Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

A liner is just a big sheet of plastic, and, of course, plastic leaks. The rain will eventually get down into the landfill.

But wait, isn’t there another liner on the bottom of the landfill, so it won’t leach on down into the water table below? Sure there is, but when you’ve got all these sharp objects in a landfill, they cut or tear holes in the plastic. So the liquids are able to seep out of the landfill and into the earth below.

Any landfill is essentially a big bathtub in the ground. And as any plumber will tell you, all bathtubs will eventually leak. Some liquid will eventually get through.

Gravity always wins, even with matter in a solid state. How quickly do you think it wins with matter in a liquid state? Over time, toxic substances will leach into your water table—the same water beneath the earth’s surface that supplies wells and springs. The water that we drink and swim in. The water that fish and other sea creatures live in. Hmm, I wonder if that’s a good idea.

You need only travel to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island in New York City—or any landfill in America—to see all the birds circling overhead. Circling. Landing. Feeding on the toxic elements in the landfill. And, with great regularity, getting snared on the plastic rings from six-packs. Ingesting all of those Styrofoam peanuts, all of those different plastics. Many different species are adversely affected by landfills because of the toxins and the ubiquitous presence of plastics that harm them in so many ways.

The Landfill Siting Issue

There’ve been landfills for thousands of years. In the earliest settlements of man, you can find midden mounds, which are basically landfills. There’s detritus. There’s trash left over from former civilizations.

When there were one billion of us on the planet, we could seemingly act with impunity as there was plenty of space to dump our trash. Now that our planet is more crowded, people have started to complain, rightly, about the landfill near their home, the odor from the landfill, the vermin that congregate around the landfill.

In days gone by we enjoyed the illusion of disposal, of throwing things away and having them just disappear, or cease to exist. In the West, there was so much space, it was possible to site landfills out of sight, out of mind. People on the East Coast, by no small coincidence, understood that this illusion was in fact false much sooner than the rest of the country because the East is far more densely settled. In the ’80s, an orphan garbage barge from Islip, New York, created an uproar when the residents of Nassau County, Long Island, couldn’t get another municipality to accept their garbage. So the people with the garbage decided they’d take it somewhere else. And those people wouldn’t take it. They tried another place and got the same story. That barge made a 6,000-mile journey before they found somewhere to dump the load.

And all this played out in front of us, thanks to the media, and it woke us up to the question of where this stuff goes. People got to thinking, “Would I want a landfill in my backyard?” I sure don’t. Do you?

All that attention to landfill siting and the overabundance of garbage gave recycling a big boost. More and more states came on board with recycling bills and instituted deposits on containers. And it’s continued to grow since then due in large part to landfill siting concerns.

The Economics of Trash

Despite the fact that no one wants trash, there’s a lot of money in it. It’s big business. For years, organized crime had a tremendous presence in the waste-hauling industry. It’s my understanding that that’s changed, and I hope that’s the case. But there are some very big waste haulers who, for years, were opposed to recycling programs because they felt it encroached on their business.

Some of these waste-hauling companies have gotten into the recycling business in a big way themselves because they’ve come to realize there’s money to be made there.

The unfortunate side effect of this is that many of the smaller recycling firms, the mom-and-pop firms, have been driven out of business, and that’s very sad.

There’s another side to the economics of trash, too:

Many things—from the sun visor in your car to the screen door on your house—are made as a unit. If part of it breaks, you’re expected to replace the whole thing; you can’t just change the mirror in the sun visor. And there’s no easy way to replace the screen mesh in a new screen door. So people are being encouraged to throw away things that likely would not have been thrown away a short time ago. That makes for more trash. But it also creates more opportunities for recycling, including many of those we’re about to discuss.

Curbside Recycling Programs

Fortunately, many cities across the United States have a curbside recycling program. These include many smaller municipalities and suburban areas, as well as large locales including:

• Boston

• Houston

• San Antonio

• Portland (Maine, Oregon, and Tennessee)

• Grand Rapids

• New York City

• Kansas City

• Salt Lake City

• San Diego

• Albuquerque

These curbside programs have vastly increased the amount of material coming into the MRFs, or materials recovery facilities. That’s material that doesn’t go to a landfill, so these programs can be a huge boon in many ways.

But there has been criticism about the pollution created by these recycling programs. That is to say: trucks—diesel trucks, in many cities—driving around and picking up this material. “For what?” critics say. “So people can feel warm and fuzzy about recycling?”

I will concede there is a certain amount of pollution involved in collecting recyclables. Critics also say that there’s a lot of energy used and—in their opinion—wasted on these curbside pickup programs. In my opinion, it takes a lot less energy to mine this stuff in our