I live in what many people describe as an idyllic little New England style town. And this is true. The only thing that really has begun to upset me is a business which lies very nearby. It is by no means close to the idyllic downtown, but it does lie no more than about 1/4 of a mile from my home. It is a mulch and soil business and it has expanded in the past couple of years.
Early on, in our first years here, a strong smell of mulch would sometimes drift our way. Now that the business has expanded and the small hills of mulch have turned into steaming mountains, the strong smell of mulch has been replaced with a sometimes overpowering smell - what a friend of mine mistook once for the biting stench of what she thought must certainly have been a chemical spill in the area.
And now, for the past year, this enterprise has been experimenting with what is called Green Grinding. They take in food waste from local grocery chains, grind it up, let it compost, and use it as a soil additive. This is all very well and good, green-thinking and saving our landfills and all, except for one teensy detail.
It stinks.
Apparently it's not supposed to stink, but the way this business is doing it, we often smell the stench of a landfill blowing our way. And in the park next door, which is even closer to this business, the stench is sometimes gut-heaving in quality. Think of the rodents that this must be attracting.
To add to all of this, the expansion of the business means that they are often very busy adding to their mountains of mulch. This process has become excessively noisy. It doesn't take place all the time (please see this post about the pleasant quiet), but when it does, the noise is fearsome. Especially when it begins at 8:00 am.
I've uploaded a little snippet of video that I took this morning from my front porch. I used a digital still camera with a video feature. You know how when you take little video snippets this way, noises which aren't right up close to the camera sometimes aren't caught, and if they are, they aren't as loud as they were in person? Keep that in mind while you listen to the sounds. Be sure to turn your volume up:
On my walk in the park with the dog before I took the video, the noise was loud enough to make my head hurt.
I know that some people live in high traffic, high noise areas, but when we moved here we bought a house at the end of a dead-end street, up against a nice park. Not a high noise, high stink area.
My how things change.
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