The Good and Bad of 4th of July Flags

I expect most Dixonites had small free American flags placed on their property by Barrett-Leber Realty for the 4th of July observance. Two of 'em were placed on my lawn. This seems to be an annual promotional effort by the realty office, with a patriotic bent. I'll be the first to say it looks nice to see so many flags fluttering in the breeze on the 4th, along with a few larger ones on people's porches. And yet, after the 4th, I frankly put them in the trash, feeling a little guilty about dumping them. I'm sure that's where most of them end up, and it would be a sorry sight to see the Stars and Stripes being dumped en masse at the landfill. 

In fact, if our civilization were to be eliminated by some catastrophe, and centuries later some new civilization arrived to colonize the earth, and they were doing archaeological digs at the hill created by the former landfill, they could measure the passage of years by the strata containing the remnants of American flags. 

The answer to this problem is to somehow use re-usable flags rather than having thousands of them used for a few days and then trashed, year after year.