David Chameides decided to keep his trash instead of throwing it out.
All of it.
Nothing went to the curb, and nothing got taken to the dump. Junk mail, food scraps, packaging material. He piled all of it in his basement.
He’s a two-time Emmy award winner for camera work, but worldwide he’s better known as “Sustainable Dave.” And his decision to keep his trash was part of a demonstration.
The average American throws out 1700 pounds of trash annually. He figured the best way to demonstrate the impact of that was to keep his trash for a year and report on the project at his website called “365 Days of Trash.”
Chameides even lugged back trash he may have produced outside the home. So, when he was on business trips or vacation, he bagged all the garbage he would have thrown out and brought it back with him in his luggage to add to the piles in his house. Organic waste was put in a worm bed in his basement, while everything else was stacked together or put in tin bins.
It's given Chameides a chance to talk about our impact on the environment, which is a good thing to consider. But when I read the story, I wondered how many of us do the same thing with our sins and failures. They just pile up, month after month, year after year, in stacks around the house.
We don’t have to live that way. We can be free of our moral garbage. Paul declared that God “has taken it away, nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:13-14). What a vivid image. Jesus’s death was an atoning death that removed the record of sin that separated us from God. So, you don’t have to live surrounded by the accumulating debt of our moral failures. It can be taken away.
Let’s look at that great truth this Sunday! Join us at 10am on campus or online.
--Tom
“Meet Dave, the Man Who Never Takes Out the Trash,” by Bryan Walsh, Time, Sep. 22, 2008.
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