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Global Warning - Jul 5, 2005 - Printable Version
- How Does Your Garbage Grow?
by Robin Buckallew
Today, I'm going to talk trash. If you like reading trash, this is the right place for you. After all, trash is a big part of American life, though it's one we don't often think about or talk about (unless, of course, we live in a trash can on Sesame Street with a certain green monster). Like most of us, I spent most of my youth oblivious to trash. Oh, I knew it existed, it was there, we put it in the trash can, and the city picked it up and whisked it away, and then it wasn't there and we didn't have to think about it. I might notice the trash on the roadside, and of course, I saw the commercials so common in the 1970s where the Indian cried a single tear about the trash on the landscape. But I had no ongoing relationship with trash, and I have no understanding of trash. My first real thoughts about trash came a few years ago, when I was attending the local arts festival, and the thing that was most prominent in the area was trash. Most of it was in cans, or bags, or being wheeled away in carts by employees, but it was definitely the defining theme. A few weeks later, I was at the local book sale at the fairgrounds, and I noticed the same phenomenon. Now, everywhere I go, it seems, I can't get away from this trend - I really do think it's following me! Everywhere humans hang out - from the state parks to the arts festivals, from the movie theatres to the camp grounds, from the office to the car to the home, the one thing you can count on that will be a unifying thread between all these diverse activities is - TRASH. Humans generate trash, and they generate it in huge amounts. And the other unifying thread is that humans don't think very much about the trash. They throw away their garbage, it disappears, and they don't have to worry about it anymore. It's all taken care of. Well, today, just for one day, I would like you to spend a few minutes thinking about trash, talking trash, reading trash, and having a solid, personal relationship with trash. First, I would like to present you with some solid facts about trash. For instance, did you know that each person in the United States throws out 4.5 pounds of garbage every day? This amounts to 1.5 tons for each of us every year. In New York City alone, there is enough garbage discarded every single day to fill the Empire State Building. In fact, New York City garbage has made the news many times - the garbage strike that left New York City looking and smelling like a landfill, the garbage barge containing 3,168 tons of waste that left Long Island in the 1980s, and couldn't find a port or a country willing to accept it. But what does all this trash consist of? Well, thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, and other people willing to engage in dumpster diving, this figure has been broken down for us. It is know that Americans get rid of 20,000 cars and 4,000 trucks and buses EVERY DAY. Forty-three thousand tons of food is thrown out every day. We the people use two and a half million plastic bottles every HOUR. We also discard about 270 million tires every year. Breaking down what we throw away into categories, we find out that 35.2% of it is paper (friends, this is recyclable - why is it in the trash?); 12.1% of it is lawn trimmings (possibly could be used as compost?); 11.7% of it is food scraps (took more than you could eat again, did you?); plastics (many also recyclable) account for 11.3% and metals 8.0%; Glass (the single most recyclable substance) is 5.3% of our trash, and wood is 5.8%. There are other miscellaneous compounds, but I think you get the picture. When you add in the waste that is generated by companies making the products that we purchase, the total waste for each American comes to 1 million pounds per person per year. Most of us are unaware that for every garbage can that is placed at the curb, 71 garbage cans worth of waste have been generated for the mining, logging, agriculture, oil and gas exploration, and industrial processes that have been used in turning raw materials into products and their packages. Every day, the United States generates enough waste to fill 44,919 garbage TRUCKS, which each hold nine TONS of trash. I have to say, that stinks.
What are the consequences of this much trash? Well, yes, the trash disappears when you put it on the curb. It is whisked away by those giant machines that your tax dollars provide. But where does it go? Most of it goes to landfills. Modern landfills are a miracle of technology, with state-of-the-art liners, and long geological studies to select the best possible site for the landfill to prevent any sort of environmental hazard. Of course, that is good, but what does it mean? Well, geological factors actually often take second place to cost, and the best site may not be inexpensive enough. The best site might also be located near a neighborhood that really doesn't want to have to live near, play near and work near a smelly old landfill. There is nothing that brings out the environmental activist in an average citizen quicker than telling them there is going to be a landfill in their neighborhood, or near their children's school. So the factors that decide the sites of landfills are not just geological or geographical desirability, but also political and economic expediency. In addition, a study conducted in 1990 found that these state of the art liners are expected to leak at the rate of about 20 gallons per acre per day, even when the very best insulators and the most expensive quality controls are used. Municipal landfills contribute a large quantity of pollution to our air and to our groundwater (you put your trash by the curb, it disappears, and reappears in your drinking water). In addition, kidding yourself about the biodegradability of your waste is a fool's game - solid waste needs oxygen and moisture to break down, and these are in short supply in a sanitary landfill. Material will not decompose particularly rapidly when buried in these conditions. Often workers digging up old landfills find old newspapers and magazines that are still readable after many years. In addition, nearly half of all US landfills are either full or have been closed because of groundwater contamination. And with the growth of our population and the demands of citizens for bigger houses, bigger yards, more golf courses, and of course, green space, not to mention the needs of agriculture to keep us fed, land is becoming more and more scare and more and more expensive. Is it worth taking all that land to fill up with trash?
OK, if you've stuck with me this far, you deserve a break from facts and figures. You also deserve a little bit of hope in the dark hour of your sudden, intense relationship with trash. So, now I will tell you - of all the significant environmental problems in the world, this one is more in your control than most. You can do something. You, little old you, can make a difference (does 1.5 tons a year make a difference - you bet your ass it does!). In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a slogan just for this problem - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In recent years, we have gotten pretty good at recycling. Unfortunately that is the wrong priority. You see, the EPA, in a rare burst of wisdom, prioritized the slogan for you. These activities are listed in the order of their desirability - and in reverse order of their actualization, unfortunately. The number one thing you can do to help is to reduce. Stop the waste before it starts. This is difficult for many people, because they think it means sacrifice -sometimes it does. They think it means giving up the things they cherish the most - I think it's usually best to start with those things you can't remember why you bought in the first place. It also means thinking about what you're buying before you buy it, and thinking about how long it will last. Buying better products that will last longer.
A significant portion of our garbage consists of the packaging that our products are wrapped in. A great deal of the cost of our product, the bulk of our product, and the waste generated by our product consists of something that is never really used at all - it exists just long enough to get the product out of it and then it is discarded without any thought for it at all. Of course, some packaging is absolutely necessary - you can't buy milk just like it is, for instance. It has to be packaged in something, otherwise, big mess. But many of our products are packaged to excess. The only purpose the packaging serves is advertising. In some cases, the packaging is more of the product than the actual product! For example, think of Lunchables®. This increasingly popular product is nearly all packaging. You get a few crackers, a few slices of lunch meat and cheese, and maybe an overly packaged drink. But you also get an enormous plastic (non-recyclable) container that is immediately discarded. You don't get much nutrition, you don't get much food, you just get a lot of plastic. Most of what you are paying for is the plastic, also, because you could buy an equivalent amount of crackers, cheese, meat and juice for a fraction of the cost. We say we are paying for the convenience - we're not. We're paying for the package. We throw away more money every year than we are conscious of. Not only does all this packaging cost us in real dollars, it costs us in tax dollars, it costs us in lost land area, it costs us in production and processing and waste disposal. It costs us in polluted groundwater. I'll give you a good rule of thumb - when you're buying a product at the grocery store (or any other store - computer stores are particularly guilty), if the packaging is twice as large as the product, it is too much. Don't buy it. If the package isn't recyclable or reusable, think twice about buying the product. That is a good starting place - eventually, you will get to a point where you will be even more discriminating about your packaging, and you will understand that it isn't necessary for toothpaste that is already in a brightly colored and highly logo-adorned tube to be in a matching cardboard box (it does perhaps make it easier to stack on the shelves - but surely we can come up with a clever solution to that problem).
Another possible solution we could embrace is the issue of the disposable society. Sometime around the 1960s, we got the idea in this country that things should be disposable, so we could use them once and throw them away. We liked this - it was convenient - we didn't have to wash or reuse as much. Companies liked this - we bought the product new every week. But it has generated more trash and more waste and more consumed virgin raw materials than most of us would like to admit. Think about trading in all your disposable products for things that last. Everything you're throwing away will remain behind for your child and your grandchildren to deal with.
Some countries have taken the trash problem very seriously. Their laws and regulations are beginning to reflect concerns about trash and landfills. In Germany, for instance, a corporation has a cradle-to-grave responsibility for the packaging of their products. A company must take back the packaging from the customer and pay for its disposal. As a result, German companies now think twice about excess packaging. Much of their packaging, in fact, is reusable. Boxes are now wood instead of cardboard, so the box can be used to repackage another item. Refillable glass bottles are another answer, that used to be rather common everywhere. In addition, German companies have cradle-to-grave responsibility for the product they produce, leading to a higher quality of product that doesn't need to be replaced all that often. This not only saves trash, but it saves money for the consumer. Not to mention, time. I personally hate using my precious leisure hours running to the store to replace an item that I just bought a few weeks ago, and now has worn out. How many times have you complained about that item you just bought, that broke already, and now you need to buy another one, at additional expense? This is also in your control - you can write to your Congressmen, request legislation similar to Germany's.
Another action that is being taken by many communities is in the area of trash fees. A citizen is charged increasingly high fees as his trash grows. You put out one trash can a week, and pay the same fees as your neighbor, who puts out three? Some communities, such as Seattle, have implemented progressive price structures that allow citizens a certain amount of trash at the base price for pickup, then additional cans are charged extra. This can be handled many different ways. In some communities, the citizens buy their trash bags from the city. Only trash contained in authorized bags will be collected. You buy and use however many bags you need, and this determines the cost. Other cities sell labels that you can attach to the bags of trash, and this is used to keep track of how many bags of trash you have picked up. This gives you the total choice, you can throw away as much as you like as long as you are willing to pay for it. Other methods that have been implemented include on-board computer monitoring by the trash collection employees (once called garbagemen). I personally don't favor this one, as it is much less efficient, and requires additional time for the garbage collection. It is unnecessarily complicated. It does, of course, reduce the possibility that someone will break into your home to steal your trash collection labels or bags!
Progressive price structures have been demonstrated to be effective. They increase the amount of recycled products, and decrease the amount of trash in the cities implementing them. If you are not living in a community that has a progressive price structure, you can change this, too. Attend your city council meetings. Become active in your community. If you can't get a change any other way, run for city office. You owe it to yourself and your community.
So, think about your trash. Open up a dialogue about trash. Talk trash to your friends and neighbors. They might begin avoiding you at first, they might tell everyone you're just a trashy person and not worth their time. But if you are persistent, and if you are sincere, you will win them over. They will begin to talk trash. They will begin to think trash. Things will begin to change. Don't just throw away your trash carelessly and thoughtlessly. Develop a relationship with it. It could change your life.
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