When was the last time you carried your trash around for a week?
As part of our chapter of learning about waste (including everything from MSW to hazardous waste to the Love Canal disaster), Mr. Gleason (the aforementioned teacher) decided that he would give us all a big black trash bag, with the instructions that we must put all odorless waste we produce into that bag, and take that bag everywhere we go.
“At least you’re getting this assignment now and not during prom week,” he said jokingly.
Despite the seeming unfairness of this unique project, though, it turned out to have the intended, powerful effect (on me, at least); for the past week, I have slowly changed my resource-using habits as I noticed how often I throw things away.
The United States currently produces 33 percent of the world’s solid waste (12 billion metric tons per year). Granted, 98.5 percent of this is from mining wastes, wastes from oil/natural gas production, agricultural wastes and industrial wastes, so the “trash” we throw away only makes up 1.5 percent of our total waste as a country.
But within that 1.5 percent is the shocking Environmental Protection Agency estimate that each person in the United States throws away an average of 1600 pounds per year (multiply that by the 3 million people who live in the United States, and it’s a pretty intimidating number).
Where does all of this waste go? A major theme of the “waste” chapter was this: There is no such thing as throwing something away. At this point, nearly all of our municipal solid waste (not to be confused with hazardous waste) is either incinerated or stored in a landfill.
There are two opposite ways to view waste (and a variety of stances in between). One way to see waste is as a necessary byproduct of economic growth; this is a high waste approach that cares little about curbing how much we waste. On the other side is a low waste view in which trash is seen as having the potential to create new products — in other words, trash is seen as treasure.
Perhaps the popular-yet-thematically slightly frightening animation Wall•E makes a prescient point about the amount we waste; it’s not sustainable. I am not suggesting that we will need to board a spaceship to escape our trashed earth, but at the same time I assert that it’s important to be aware of how much we waste and how, again, nothing can ever really be thrown away.
After spending a week carrying around our trash, we weighed it and made a pile of trash bags on one side of the classroom. It’s interesting to see how much just 108 people created.
Interestingly, and a bit daunting. While not all of my classmates will walk away from this with a new perspective about waste, I certainly did. It is increasingly clear to me that the only responsible way of living is to waste as little as possible and support industries that waste immensely, as little as possible, because no matter where we decide to store the waste, whether we burn our waste or bury it or throw it in the ocean or ship it to Nevada, or ship it overseas or have it produced in a developing country so that it isn’t on our land, it all comes back eventually, in one form or another.
The more than 60 percent increase in our personal waste since 1962 cannot be a trend of increase that is continued into the future; the time for change, even in something as unattractive as our garbage, truly is now.
Isabelle D’Arcy is a senior at Dos Pueblos High School.
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