An article I've been working on

Here is a work in progress that will hopefully be featured in kitsch magazine's next volume. (Kitsch magazine includes articles on all subjects with contributors from both IC and Cornell)

Prepare to be utterly astonished by trash. Americans use more than 67 million tons of paper per year, or about 580 pounds per person. American businesses generate enough paper to circle the earth 20 times? Every Sunday, Americans waste 90 percent of recyclable newspapers- which take 500,000 trees to produce for that day’s newspapers alone. The mind reels.
The list of unnerving facts can go on and on, sinking one into a progressively deeper state of depression. How did our nation, and for that matter most developed nations, come to consume on such a massive scale and neglect to recognize the importance of reusing raw materials?
The concept of “trash” has changed dramatically in recent times. Most Americans produced little waste before the 20th century--dirty dishwater was dumped into the garden, food scraps were fed to animals, and materials were regularly salvaged from dumps. Trash was even burned to heat the home and for cooking. Households used to be closed systems, where goods were consumed in their entirety and reused until it was simply impossible to utilize them anymore. Industrialization and mass production have changed our attitudes completely. Clothing is replaced as fashions change, advertisements clog up magazines, handiwork in the home is obsolete. When was the last time you had your shoes repaired? Buying something new is often more convenient and sometimes even less expensive then trying to repair an older item (you know, like that laptop you bought last year that is already just causing you too much trouble). Nowadays, the emphasis is on quantity of manufactured goods, not quality, so things wear down and break more easily. In fact, they are specifically designed to do so.
How did we become so disconnected from our trash? In 1842, a report produced in England linked disease to unsanitary environmental conditions, helping to launch the "age of sanitation." People began to realize that their habits of dumping waste out the window into their yards and into the streets was posing health issues, and that the waste needed to be disposed of in a way that separated it from the rest of society. The pigs, rats, and other animals that roamed the streets and found sources of food in the trash also became the targets of new sanitation laws. By 1895, the New York City Street Cleaning Commissioner had set up the country’s first comprehensive system for public garbage management. And one year later, NYC established the country’s first recycling center—back then, raw materials were much more expensive to procure than now, and recycling made economic sense.
Even with the advent of public waste management, basically the only waste being produced at the turn of the century was food waste. Times were much simpler and so was the waste stream. American per capita waste generation prior to World War II was estimated to be less than half a pound per person per day. In 2000, each person was generating 4.5 pounds of waste a day. Today, we lead the world in municipal waste production; the average American consumes 17 times more than the average citizen of Mexico and hundreds of times more than the average Ethiopian.
Consumer prosperity reached an all-time high after the economic boom created by World War II. In 1955, Life magazine heralded the era of the “throwaway society” which was born out of the war. The rate of increase in consumerism has never slowed down since. In less than a century, household waste went from something you could dump out your window to something that had gotten completely unmanageable, even with the intervention of local governments. No one could predict that the waste stream would grow as rapidly as it did in the late 20th century and into the 21st century. Many cities had serious problems figuring out where to put all of their trash, and recycling became an integral part of solid waste management. Through education and programs making recycling easy and rewarding (e.g. cash incentives), the U.S. achieved a 25 percent recycling rate by 1996. With consumerism continuing to increase and space for all of its by-products decreasing, waste reduction and recycling are becoming more critical than ever in solid waste management and policy.
Today, the highest point in Ohio is “Mount Rumpke,” which is actually a sanitarylandfill--a mountain of trash. Currently, the largest man-made structure in the world is Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, NY (Fresh Kills is now closed because it had become so tall it was beginning to interfere with flights going into Newark Airport). Because we don’t usually see its accumulation, we don’t feel any responsibility toward our waste. And with few things being homemade anymore, a lack of sentimental regard for our things leads us to throw them away without a second thought. Everything is available in an unlimited supply within a ten-minute drive, so why bother?
But the Earth isn't going to supply us with everything we need for forevermore. We are consuming the Earth’s resources faster than they are being replenished, and a look into the future clearly shows us that we should start taking responsibility for this unbalanced equation now.
At first glance, it seems that it is actually more difficult not to recycle at Ithaca College. It is almost impossible to find a trash can on campus without a recycling bin only a few feet away. There are at least four recycling bins located right next to every dumpster outside the dorms, and there are two recycling bins in every dorm room. Yet Ithaca College only recycles about thirty percent of its waste. A quick glance into a dumpster will reveal a wealth of cardboard boxes, drink containers, and likewise recyclable items. People will say they are “too lazy” to recycle. This excuse is highly questionable: the fact is that it takes almost no effort whatsoever to recycle on campus.
Given our out-of-sight, out-of-mind way of looking at waste production, it’s easy to understand why people don’t recognize the importance of recycling. But a naïve environmental idealist like myself is always looking to turn people’s heads on this issue.
For example, we’re devoting a ridiculous amount of space to housing our garbage--t here are over 3,500 landfills in the United States alone. And forty to fifty percent of a landfill’s volume is comprised of paper--one of the easiest materials to recycle. Landfills are costly, noisy, smelly, bring in lots of traffic, and have the potential to pollute the surrounding environment if the waste cannot be completely contained. They are also permanent--because they are airtight, biodegradation cannot occur. Filled in with dirt daily, once they reach their maximum capacity landfills are sealed shut, so there is virtually no airflow in the system. Some contain intact heads of lettuce from the 1970s that still appear to be edible. Landfills are filled with materials that were produced from non-renewable resources. Not only is it expensive to reproduce these materials, but sometime in the future it will no longer be possible. While we are wondering what to do as we run out of petroleum, there is plenty of it buried eternally in our heaps of trash.
Because landfills lower property values, they are often surrounded by low-income communities. These communities must bear the burden of dealing with the traffic, noise, smells, and potential health hazards associated with their marvelous community landmark. If you’re looking for the origin of the term “white trash”, envision some of the people living in these areas. The term “white trash” is targeted at white people with low social status and poor prospects for the future. It is an accurate term in a very literal sense for many people living near landfills- they are defined by their life in the trashy part of town. These people are treated like the trash they're surrounded by- the better-off part of society tends to regard them with an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality. The privileged classes don't think about the people who live in these communities any more than they think about where their trash goes when they throw it away.
Warren County, North Carolina is 65% African American and the poorest county in the state. For twenty years, the142-acre Warren County toxic waste dump regularly received hazardous waste from throughout the state. Though the site was opened in 1982 and the health risks were apparent throughout the time it was in use, no cleanup occurred until 2003. In 1992, the Environmental Protection Agency looked at this site and others and concluded that “racial minority and low-income populations experience higher-than-average exposure to selected air pollutants, hazardous waste facilities, contaminated fish and agricultural pesticides in the workplace”.
In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, five Superfund sites were flooded, making their waste containment systems even more questionable than they already were. A Superfund site is a heavily contaminated toxic waste site that has been abandoned. With global warming widely considered to be one of the biggest threats posed to our future, natural disasters are expected to occur more frequently, meaning more hurricanes and floods. New Orleans might be only the first city to have this problem.
Where does our waste go from our dumpsters and recycling bins? The answer is complex. Tompkins County Recycling and Solid Waste receives a great deal of it. From there, the trash might be sent to the Seneca Meadows Landfill in Waterloo, about an hour north of Ithaca. The recyclables are sent to many different locations. HDPE Plastics #1-7 are sent to Raleigh, North Carolina. UBC used beverage cans go to Chicago. Electronics go to Horseheads, NY. Other destinations for our recyclables include Ontario and Quebec in Canada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Alabama. Scrap metal and loose tin are the only materials on a very long list that stay in Ithaca. We export the rest of our waste for other locations to deal with.
We can’t go on building landfills forever. Our Earth only has a finite amount of space, and devoting more and more of it to garbage is appealing to no one. The next time you’re about to throw away a can of soda or an old notebook or anything recyclable, think for a moment. How would you like to live next to a landfill? What’s going to happen when the petroleum, paper, or glass used to make that product is no longer available? Can you justify another unnecessary addition to a mountain of trash somewhere that someone has to look at every day? For the sake of the environment, other people, and yourself, hold onto that “trash” until you find the next available recycling bin--in Ithaca, it’s bound to be in plain sight.