]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] RUBBISH! [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ By William L. Rathje (2/3/1990) [Abridged from The Atlantic, December 1989, p. 99-106,108-109] [Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC] It may be that the lack of reliable information and the persistence of misinformation constitute the real garbage crisis [in America]. My program at the University of Arizona, The Garbage Project, has been looking at landfills and at fresh garbage out of the can since the early 1970s, and it has generated important insights. When seen in perspective, our garbage woes turn out to be serious -- indeed, they have been serious for more than a century -- but they are not exceptional, and they can be dealt with by disposal methods that are safe and already available. The biggest challenge we will face is to recognize that the conventional wisdom about garbage is often wrong. Calculating the total annual volume or weight of garbage in the United States is difficult because there is, of course, no way one can actually measure or weigh more than a fraction of what is thrown out. All studies have had to take shortcuts. Not surprisingly, estimates of the size of the U.S. solid-waste stream are quite diverse. Figures are most commonly expressed in pounds discarded per person per day, and the studies that I have seen from the past decade and a half give the following rates: 2.9 pounds per person per day, 3.02 pounds, 4.24, 4.28, 5.0, and 8.0. My own view is that the higher estimates significantly overstate the problem. Garbage Project studies of actual refuse reveal that even three pounds of garbage per person per day may be too high an estimate for many parts of the country, a conclusion that has been corroborated by weigh-in sorts in many communities. Fast-food packaging is ubiquitous and conspicuous. Planned obsolescence is a cliche. Out society is filled with symbolic reminders of waste. What we forget is everything that is no longer there to see. We do not see the 1,200 pounds per year of coal ash that every American generated at home at the turn of the century and that was usually dumped on the poor side of town. We do not see the hundreds of thousands of dead horses that once had to be disposed of by American cities every year. We do not look behind modern packaging and see the food waste that it has prevented, or the garbage that it has saved us from making. (Consider the difference in terms of garbage generation between making orange juice from concentrate and orange juice from scratch; and consider the fact that producers of orange-juice concentrate sell the leftover orange rinds as feed, while households don't.) The average household in Mexico City produces one third more garbage a day than does the average American household. The reason for the relatively favorable U.S. showing is packaging -- which is to say, modernity. No, Americans are not suddenly producing more garbage. Per capita our record is, at worst, one of relative stability. A sanitary landfill is typically a depression lined with clays, in which each day's deposit of fresh garbage is covered with a layer of dirt or plastic or both. It is a fact that there is an acute shortage of sanitary landfills for the time being, especially in the northeastern United States. From 1982 to 1987 some 3,000 landfills have been filled up and shut down nationwide. The customary formulation of the problem we face (you will find it in virtually every newspaper or magazine article on the subject) is that 50 percent of the landfills now in use will close down within five years. As it happens, that has always been true -- it was true in 1970 and in 1960 -- because most landfills are designed to be in use for only about ten years. As noted, we are not producing more household garbage per capita (though we are probably producing more garbage overall, there being more of us). The problem is that old landfills are not being replaced. Texas, for example, awarded some 250 permits a year for landfills in the mid-seventies but awarded fewer than fifty last year. The idea persists nevertheless that we are filling up landfills at an exponential rate, and that certain products with a high public profile [disposable diapers, fast-food packaging] are disproportionately responsible. The physical reality inside a landfill is considerably different from what you might suppose. I spent some time with the Garbage Project's team over the past two years digging into seven landfills: two outside Chicago, two in the San Francisco Bay area, two in Tucson, and one in Phoenix. We exhumed 16,000 pounds of garbage, weighing every item we found and sorting them all into twenty-seven basic categories and then into 162 sub-groupings. In those eight tons of garbage and dirt cover there were fewer than sixteen pounds of fast-food packaging; in other words, only about a tenth of one percent of the landfill's contents by weight consisted of fast-food packaging. Less than one percent of the contents by weight was disposable diapers. The entire category of things made from plastic accounted for less than five percent of the landfill's contents by weight, and for only 12 percent by volume. The real culprit in every landfill is plain old paper -- non-fast-food paper, and mostly paper that isn't for packaging. Paper accounts for 40 to 50 percent of everything we throw away, both by weight and by volume. If fast-food packaging is the Emperor's New Clothes of garbage, then a number of categories of paper goods collectively deserve the role of Invisible Man. In all the hand-wringing over the garbage crisis, has a singe voice been raised against the proliferation of telephone books? Each two-volume set of Yellow Pages distributed in Phoenix last year -- to be thrown out this year -- weighed 8.63 pounds, for a total of 6,000 tons of wastepaper. And competitors of the Yellow Pages have appeared virtually everywhere. Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books, like geological strata, or layers of cake. Just as conspicuous as telephone books are newspapers, which make up 10 to 18 percent of the contents of a typical municipal landfill by volume. Even after several years of burial they are usually well preserved. During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating back to 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast. Deep within landfills, copies of that New York Times editorial about fast-food containers [straining the capacity of the nation's landfills] will remain legible until well into the next century. The notion that much biodegradation occurs inside lined landfills is largely a popular myth. Laboratories can indeed biodegrade newspapers into gray slime in a few weeks or months, if the newspapers are finely ground and placed in ideal conditions. The difficulty, of course, is that newspapers in landfills are not ground up, conditions are far from ideal, and biodegradation does not follow laboratory schedules. Some food and yard debris does degrade, but at a very, very slow rate (by 25 to 50 percent over ten to fifteen years). The remainder of the refuse in landfills seems to retain its original weight, volume, and form. It is, in effect, mummified. This may be a blessing, because if paper did degrade rapidly, the result would be an enormous amount of inks and paint that could leach into groundwater. The fact that plastic does not biodegrade, which is often cited as one of its great defects, may actually be one of its great virtues. Much of plastic's bad reputation is undeserved. Because plastic bottles take up so much room in our kitchen trash cans, we infer that they take up a lot of room in landfills. In fact by the time garbage has been compressed in garbage trucks (which exert a pressure of up to fifty pounds per square inch on their loads) and buried for a year or two under tons of refuse, anything plastic has been squashed flat. In terms of landfill volume, plastic's share has remained unchanged since 1970. And plastic, being inert, doesn't introduce toxic chemicals into the environment. Plastic that is biodegradable may in fact represent a step backwards. Plastics ``totally'' degrade when their tensile strength is reduced by 50 percent. At that point -- after as long as twenty years -- a biodegradable plastic will have degenerated into many little plastic pieces, but the total volume of plastic will not have changed at all. The degeneration agent used in biodegradable plastic, usually mostly cornstarch, makes up no more than 6 percent of a biodegradable plastic item's total volume; the 94 percent that's left represents more plastic than would be contained in the same item made with nonbiodegradable plastic, because items made with biodegradable plastic have to be thicker to compensate for the weakening effect of the degenerating agent. The landfill movement that matured after the Second World War, though hardly messianic, was led by people who had a vision. They believed that in the disposal of garbage two birds could almost always be killed instead of one. In the case of sanitary landfills, their proponents hoped not only to dispose of mountains of garbage but also to reclaim thousands of acres of otherwise ``waste'' land and, literally, to give something back to America. The ideal places for landfills, they argued, were the very places that most scientists now believe to be the worst places to put garbage: along rivers or in wetlands. It is in unlined landfills in places like these that, not surprisingly, the problem of chemical ``leachates'' has been shown to be a matter of grave concern. Environmental scientists believe that they now know enough to design and locate safe landfills, even if those landfills must hold a considerable amount of hazardous household waste such as motor oil and pesticides. The State of New York recently commissioned an environmental survey of 42 percent of its domain with the express aim of determining where landfills might be properly located. The survey pinpointed lands that constitute only one percent of the area but nevertheless total 200 square miles. The obstacles to the sanitary landfill these days are monetary -- transporting garbage a few hundred miles by truck may cost more than shipping the same amount to Taiwan -- and, perhaps more important, psychological: no one wants a garbage dump in his back yard. But they are not insuperable, and they are not fundamentally geographic. Quite frankly, few nations have the enormous (and enormously safe) landfill capabilities that this one has. Newsprint illustrates one potential problem [of recycling]. Only about ten percent of old newspapers go on to be recycled into new newspapers. What newspapers are really good for is making cereal and other boxes (if it's gray on the inside, it's from recycled stock), the insides of automobiles, wallboard, and insulation. All these end uses are near saturation. Last year the State of New Jersey [implemented newspaper recycling]. As a result, in recent months the price of used newspaper in most parts of New Jersey has plummeted from up to $40 a ton to -$25 a ton -- in other words, you have to pay to have it taken away. [The market for recycled-paper became glutted.] Where recycling is concerned, municipalities are good at two things: collecting garbage and passing laws to legislate monetary incentives. The utility of legislated source reduction is in many respects an illusion. For one thing, most consumer industries already have -- and have responded to -- strong economic incentives to make products as compact and light as possible, for ease of distribution and to conserve costly resources. In 1970 a typical plastic soda bottle weighed sixty grams; today it weighs forty-eight grams and is more easily crushed. For another, who is to say when packaging is excessive? We have all seen small items in stores -- can openers, say -- attached to big pieces of cardboard hanging on a display hook. That piece of cardboard looks like excessive packaging, but its purpose is to deter shoplifting. Finally, source-reduction measures don't end up eliminating much garbage; hamburgers, eggs, and VCRs, after all, will still have to be put in something. Most source-reduction plans are focused on a drastic reduction in the use of plastic. And yet in landfills foams and other plastics are dormant. While some environmentalists claim that plastics create dioxins when burned in incinerators, a study by New York State's Department of Energy Conservation cleared the most widely used plastics of blame. The purist's theory is that industry is forcing plastics and convenience products on an unwilling captive audience. This is nonsense. American consumers, though they may in some spiritual sense lament packaging, as a practical matter depend on the product identification and convenience that modern packaging allows. That's the reason source reduction usually doesn't work. Our short-term aesthetic concerns and long-term practical concerns for the environment are luxuries afforded us only by our wealth. In Third World countries, where a job and the next meal are significant worries, the quality of the environment is hardly a big issue in most people's minds. Concern for the environment can be attributed in major part to the conveniences -- and the leisure time they afford -- that some activists seem to want to eliminate. Safely sited and designed landfills should be employed in the three quarters of the country where there is still room for them. Incinerators with appropriate safety devices and trained workers can be usefully sited anywhere but make the most sense in the Northeast. And states and municipalities need to cut deals with wastepaper and scrap dealers on splitting the money to be made from recycling. This is a minimum. Many things could be done to increase the demand for recycled paper. For example, the federal government, which uses more paper by far than any other institution in America, could insist that most federal paperwork be done on recycled paper. Most garbage specialists would recommend a highly selective attack on a few kinds of plastic: not because plastic doesn't degrade or is ugly but because recycling certain plastics in household garbage would yield high-grade costly resins for new plastics and make incineration easier on the furnace grates, and perhaps safer. Finally, we need to expand our knowledge base. At present we have more reliable information about Neptune than we do about this country's solid-waste stream. * * *
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