The Myth of Away: Where Your Trash Really Goes

The Convenient Lie

My four-year-old nephew asked me where his broken toy went after we threw it away. “Away,” I said automatically, the same answer adults have been giving children for generations. But he tilted his head and asked, “Where’s away?” I opened my mouth to explain and realized I had no idea. We’ve created a mythology around “away” – this magical place where problems vanish and consequences disappear. It’s the adult version of believing our childhood messes disappeared when we shoved them under the bed. Environmental activist Annie Leonard shatters this comfortable delusion: “There is no such thing as ‘away.’ When we throw anything away, it must go somewhere.” Her words force us to confront an uncomfortable truth – we never outgrew hiding our messes, we just got better at it.

Facing Reality

Leonard’s quote strips away the elaborate fiction we’ve built around disposal. Every item we’ve ever discarded is still out there, somewhere, continuing its existence in landfills, oceans, or communities far from our daily view. What makes this realization jarring is how thoroughly we’ve convinced ourselves otherwise. We’ve designed a system around the fantasy of disappearance – trucks that come while we sleep, facilities built far from neighborhoods, processing that happens out of sight. Leonard spent years following these hidden trails and discovered that “away” often means Ghana’s Agbogbloshie dump, where children dismantle our old electronics by hand, or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where our plastic bottles swirl in a vortex twice the size of Texas. We’ve outsourced not just the disposal, but the consequences.

One Person’s Journey

Rob Greenfield decided to collapse this distance between disposal and consequence by carrying all his trash for thirty days. What started as an experiment became a walking art installation of American consumption. By week three, he was buried under bags of waste, looking like a refugee from a post-apocalyptic movie. Every purchase became an agonizing decision because he’d have to carry its packaging forever. Strangers stopped him constantly, and in their reactions, he saw his own former blindness reflected back. One woman told him, “I never thought about where my trash goes until I saw you carrying yours.” The experiment revealed something profound: distance isn’t just physical, it’s emotional. When we can’t see our impact, we can’t feel it either.

Creating Change

Understanding that “away” doesn’t exist transforms every choice into an act of geography – you’re deciding where something will exist for decades. This shift in perspective makes sustainable choices feel less like sacrifice and more like basic logic. I started imagining my discarded items taking up residence in specific places, and suddenly bringing my own containers didn’t feel like extra effort – it felt like being a good neighbor to the planet. The changes don’t have to be dramatic. When my coffee maker broke, instead of researching replacements, I researched repairs. Twenty minutes and one YouTube video later, it was working better than before. I felt like I’d cheated the system somehow, keeping something functional that was supposed to disappear. Local repair cafes are turning this feeling into community events, where fixing becomes an act of rebellion against planned obsolescence. The most powerful thing you can do in a throwaway culture is keep things alive.

Today’s Challenge

Choose one item you typically discard without thought – coffee cups, food packaging, broken items – and follow its trail to where it really ends up. Let that discovery shape your next decision.

Living Consciously

The myth of “away” serves a purpose – it lets us consume without consequences. But once you see through it, you can’t unsee it. Every purchase becomes a vote for the kind of world you want to live in. You start gravitating toward businesses that design for longevity instead of disposal. You begin seeing abundance in what you already own rather than in what you might acquire. Most importantly, you model a different relationship with stuff for everyone around you, especially the children who are still learning where “away” really is.

Start Today

The next time someone asks where something goes when we throw it “away,” resist the comfortable fiction and help them trace the real journey. Sometimes the most powerful environmental action is simply seeing clearly – and choosing to act on what you’ve seen.