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]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] 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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