Ooh! Ooh!

Hey, guess what! You went to the most happenin' event in the city today, right? Psh, not the no pants subway ride (seriously, maybe the Public Health badge is making me a little germaphobic, but I have seen a surprising amount of poo on subway seats, and I don't even like to touch the subway handrails. With my hands).

Duh. Today was Mulchfest.

I do not have a Christmas tree. In fact, I pretty much could not less have a Christmas tree. My apartment has a single plant, and it's an aloe that Charlie the cat ate half of at some point this fall. But I do know that, well, Christmas trees exist. It's impossible to walk a block without seeing them, forsaken and browning by the curb. And yet, while I was both being kind of bummed out by trees and by Public Health's requirement that I spend a little more time than I'd like considering the city's disposal of garbage, Mulchfest arrives.

With 81 locations (by the way, is that not an enormous number?), Mulchfest makes post-Christmas either a little less depressing or a hell of a lot gorier. For no cost (except the time it takes you to lug a tree a dozen blocks or so), a crack team of volunteers from MillionTrees will send your tree on a one-way trip through the woodchipper. (There's a kind of adorable flash video of a pigeon demonstrating on the Parks and Rec website. In real life, it's noisier and smellier, and with 100% fewer pigeons in jaunty hats.) The nearest location was a 15 or so block walk from my house, and while no one had a total for today's turnout (yet!), Prospect Park was pretty busy. Check out great photos from FlatbushGardener for the whole volunteers-with-shovels experience.

Best part? Free mulch, if that's the kind of thing you need. (This would have been amazing when I was a kid and neighbors were always in the process of remulching their landscaping, though I suppose that was more of a get-a-truckload-of-mulch and less the bag-your-own option available today). Saddest part? The frequent reminders to remove all ornaments and tinsel from trees. (People totally fail to do this every now and again, and it's a little bit heartbreaking, in a MacArthur Park, cake-in-the-rain kind of way.)

Anyway. Mulchfest is a good example of things that are right about NYC's trash disposal, though there's a good bit that's wrong with it as well (which I'll address later on). It's waste disposal week here at Boy Scout Handbook. How can things get any better?