| From Forecast Earth, an illuminating overview of the fate of some common items that typically pass through your hands in a matter of days or only minutes and may not pass through your thoughts at all. Read "In a landfill, how long does trash really last?" Then REDUCE (don't buy in the first place if you can help it, especially if it isn't fully recyclable or non-toxic and biodegradable), REUSE (borrow, trade, buy used, salvage, re-purpose, and opt for quality durable goods (and take care of them!) over purchasing disposable, single-use, highly packaged and processed, poorly made things), and finally RECYCLE (which includes composting, the original recycling system).
What this otherwise excellent article doesn't tell you is the upstream story. Less than 2% of the solid waste stream is post-consumer.* All that stuff that ends up in a landfill was quarried, mined, logged, drilled, grown and harvested, or bred and fattenend, shipped somewhere, refined or slaughtered or siloed, shipped, manufactured, shipped, packaged, shipped, warehoused, and shipped again on its way to your local retailer and, sooner or later, a landfill. Figure that for everything you throw away, 50-75 times--not percent, times--as much solid waste (read: land, soil nutrients, and raw materials rendered more or less permanently useless) is committed before you see something on the shelf. And that's not counting air and water pollution caused, water used, or fuel burned in the extraction, refinement, and transportation process.
Another important factor in recycling: materials returned for recycling don't actually get recycled unless it is cost-effective for the industry to do so, i.e. cheaper (in $) than extracting new materials and marketable as new products. Recycling almost always saves significant amounts primary resources and energy (especially in the case of glass and metal) but does not always save the manufacturer money. Newly extracted energy and raw materials are cheap in $ because ecological and social costs (arable land lost, habitat destroyed, air and water polluted, illness caused, communities displaced) are not figured in to the sticker price of extraction. Neither is disposal.
Even recycling, though much preferable to not recycling, takes up some amount of land, water, fuel, and raw materials for the bins, vehicles, machines, and factories. So think before you buy that container. Especially if it's plastic. The recycling record on glass, metal, paper, and cardboard is much better than that of plastic.
Would we think differently about garbage if everything we wasted had to remain in our home state? Our city limits? Our backyard? What if we had to pay by the pound for our permanent trash? Since money is a temporary and relative social construct while the health of the ecosphere is a concrete condition upon which all life and health depends, is it even possible to put a meaningful $ value on how our current consuming-and-wasting system affects what we leave, or don't leave, to the generations who will have to live with our mess?
The good news is that society finally seems to be catching on and starting to facilitate certain environmentally responsible habits. But we have a long way to go. We would do well to realize that the transition to a sustainable society is not going to be easy or convenient, and that 'going green' is less about fancy engineering and buying things with the right sticker, and more about not buying stuff, not using energy, disciplining ourselves to do without, and gaining the skills and tools to provide for ourselves close to home.
*Similar figures in both For the Beauty of the Earth by Steven Bouma-Prediger and "The Story of Stuff" online short film. |
