Recycling woes | The Salt Lake Tribune

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Our family pays $6 a month for a green-waste garbage can. Wanting to be ecologically minded, we went to the Bountiful dump to purchase mulch made from the waste from the cans. The dump was not selling mulch: "The content of arsenic was too high."

My neighbor went to a local garden club, where she learned about the fertilizing and recycling virtues of turkey litter (the poultry manure mixed with the bedding — wood shavings, rice hulls, etc. — that is scooped up at turkey farms.

She applied turkey litter to her beautiful garden. After the recent storms, her garden was blanketed with a thick red layer of prostrate pigweed.

A Web search revealed that turkey litter is often full of pigweed seeds. Pigweed is resistant to Round-up weedkiller. So, instead, people spray weedkillers that contain arsenic, which will eventually end up in Woods Cross' water supply, which is from wells.

So my neighbor and I are removing the weeds by scraping the entire surface with a snow shovel. Her garden is now full of billions of weed seeds. It will be full of weeds for years to come.

Recycling is not always a good solution to our environmental problems.

Sharon Bench

Woods Cross