Now, twenty days into the second month of what has become an ongoing challenge, I'm curious about the afterlife of the things I purge, and more cautious about acquiring them in the first place if the plan later is to discard them.
This weekend, curiosity meant pulling over unexpectedly and compelling the friend who was with me to traipse across an unmown field to check out what I suspected was an old landfill.
The telltale signs of a garbage cemetery, as far as I can tell, include an elevated mound covered with conventional and prairie grasses and one or more tower flares.
Unfortunately, while I could see a faint ripple of burning gas, my camera didn't capture it. Perhaps the visual effect was lessened due to the clear sky...or perhaps there was simply less methane burning at that moment. Up close though, I could hear the sound: a never-ceasing torch wind.
I realized that the landfill I was standing on had been converted into a golf course when I heard a loud THWACK! nearby, followed by the good-natured ribbing of a group of guys trying to play.
The mound wasn't as high as I expected, but as Adam suggested during my tour of the landfill on day #20, collected garbage tends to lose volume over time as it settles. It doesn't decompose as fast as we think it might though. According to Craig Freudenrich, Ph.D.:
"Trash put in a landfill will stay there for a very long time. Inside a landfill, there is little oxygen and little moisture. Under these conditions, trash does not break down very rapidly. In fact, when old landfills have been excavated or sampled, 40-year-old newspapers have been found with easily readable print. Landfills are not designed to break down trash, merely to bury it. When a landfill closes, the site, especially the groundwater, must be monitored and maintained for up to 30 years!" (Retrieved from How Stuff Works)Indeed, the task of managing a landfill doesn't end for a long time, even after the land has been re-purposed. The extraction of gasses and collection of leachate (see day #20) are ongoing responsibilities 24 hours a day, 7 days a year until these are no longer a threat. I asked Adam how long it takes to burn all of the landfill gasses.
"[It] depends on the size of the landfill and the type of waste buried in [the] landfill. In our case, the mathematical model shows that we will be able to extract landfill gasses 80 years into the future. Even then, there might be traces of gasses needing to be flared."That's a long time to wait before garbage is no longer a threat!
My city has at least six 'finished' landfills in addition to the ones that are currently open. The finished landfills are home to the one golf course, two public parks, and three multi-use spaces (including public parks and off-leash dog parks). I've heard that there are other, much older landfills on which buildings have been built. I assume these aren't listed on public sites because they no longer require maintenance. (Still working on confirming that.)
In any case, Freudenrich suggests that since 1960, we've doubled the volume of garbage we've disposed of in landfills.
What happens when a city runs out of room to bury its trash?
While searching references to 'disposable lives', I discovered a video about how New York City manages its waste since running out of landfill space in 2001. The video is called Our Disposable Lives: The Landfill and is well worth the 6:22 minutes to watch.
The host asked one of the garbage collectors what they see most. Sadly:
"A lot of one-time use stuff."
When a city like New York runs out of space, they pay a lot of money to ship it away to other states that will take it.
According to Hobart and William Smith Colleges: Landfills: Where Does Our Trash Go?, shipping garbage far away isn't uncommon:
"The number of landfills in the US has declined in the past few decades from over 7,300 in 1989 to fewer than 1,800 in 2007. New Jersey has to ship 50% of its solid wastes, or 11 million tons per year to nearby states. In March 2001, New York City closed its Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. This one facility was the largest landfill in the world, accepting over 12,000 tons of trash each day from 50% of the 8.36 million people in New York City. Today, NYC exports 20% of its trash to other parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other states. Toronto outsources up to 40% of its refuse, some of it to the United States."And when we we run out of places to ship it away?
Maybe it would be better to avoid having to find out. Here are two things we can do:
- Recycle paper. When I visited the landfill, Adam told me that 20% of our landfill's total garbage is paper, which is a shame when it could have been recycled. This probably includes paper towel and napkin waste (see day #8) and junk mail waste (see day #14). The article, Paper Recycling: The Gift that Could Give Much More suggests closer to 30% of paper ends up in landfills, and offers additional perspective on the scope of the problem and why the way we're handling it is ineffectual.
- Reduce and reuse before recycling. On day #7, I learned why recycling lulls us into a false sense of living sustainably. This article, Are big blue bins bad for recycling?, offers a city-by-city comparison of recycling rates (Boston's to San Francisco's), and the conclusion is the same:
"'You can’t give people a recycling bin and expect a light bulb to go on,' says consultant Amy Perlmutter. Maybe, she says, the best way to increase recycling is to move beyond recycling. 'We need to change consumption habits, change products, and shift public behavior away from disposable items,' says Randi Mail, director of recycling for Cambridge. 'That doesn’t necessarily mean sacrifice, it just means change.'”I'm not sure I agree that there isn't sacrifice. Until regulation changes, which would enable restaurants, for example, to let me take carry-out in my own stainless steel or glass containers, I have largely given up on carry-out. That's a small sacrifice, but it has a benefit: I eat on the run way less than I used to. Maybe that's what Mail means by change.
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