Teaching of "taking apart."

Our temple has some trash and garbage cans and for each trashcan, we use a plastic bag.    Our fujinkai members used to replace bags every Saturday.  It seemed they didn't care whether bag is full or not, they threw away old bags with trash and used new ones. 

 I understood it for the purpose of cleanliness but I actually didn't like it.   I always thought it "Mottainai" or "what a waste!"  Those bags could hold some more trash and bags could be used repeatedly at least a few times, because trash from temple are not so dirty.

If I can collect all our trash in one trash bag once a week,  our temple could save trash bags.

This is how I started a tiny effort to use less bags.   In order to put maximum amount of the trash in a limited capacity of the bag,  I soon realized what I needed was I should take apart trash as small as possible.

For example, if you throw the flower without cutting it smaller, the flower takes for a large percentage of the trash can.  And easily it becomes full.

On the other hand, if you can cut the flower into many pieces,  the flower shouldn't take much space.

And you can put more trash in the same bag.

I think this indicates the great way to overcome the problem.  

Whenever a problem came up, we should not abandon "problem."   If you let it go as it is, the problem can take a large percentage of your mind.  So just like taking apart the flower, we need to  take apart the problem.  

If we can take apart the problem, we can understand various factors of the problem.  And because each factor of the problem gets to be smaller, it should not accounts for a large percentage of your mind.         

These were part of green waste that  I picked up from the temple ground.  Uncle Kuni said same thing, "make them smaller pieces, so that a truck can carry them all."