The Trash Can IS The Environment
Throwing away trash…It’s so addictively easy.
Can’t figure out what to do with all that plastic packaging? How about all these food scraps? Old ripped clothes or a broken TV?
Just toss it all in the trash and you never have to worry about it again.
Have you ever thought about what you would do if you DIDN’T have that super easy magically-make-stuff-disappear-from-your-life box? What would you do with all that stuff?
You could just throw it out the window! Or chuck it at the local park or a river! Or just pile it up in your backyard!
I imagine most of you had the same reaction to that way of thinking that I did: “No way, I don’t want to throw that stuff into the environment where it pollutes the environment! Not where people and animals live! I don’t want to pile it somewhere where it’s in my way!” It just FEELS wrong. It’s polluting! Which just makes throwing stuff away in the garbage can even easier.
But I realized something: when you throw something in the trash, you ARE throwing it into the environment. Just not the environment directly around you. You’re just handing it off to someone else who’s taking it and dumping it in some other environment.
The Reality of Trash Dumps
Think about it…Where does that trash get taken? It doesn’t get taken to a magical “make garbage disappear” zone. It doesn’t get chucked into a black hole. It gets thrown into the environment…Only it’s an environment that was arbitrarily selected to be a “dumping environment” for our trash. I promise you, before they started dumping trash there, wildlife lived there. It was part of nature.
So when you throw away things in the garbage, as opposed to out your window, the only difference is where in the environment it’s going.
We just crossed 8 billion people on planet earth. And unfortunately, there IS no good place to dump our ever-growing amounts of trash. What happens when our current trash dumps fill up? We select a new one, bulldoze whatever is there now, and start dumping there. And that pattern will continue for as long as we dump trash.
If our garbage was made up of entirely biodegradable things, we could potentially move back and forth between two different spots, waiting for one to biodegrade. But increasingly, everything we use, from utensils to clothes to electronics, has plastic in it which takes thousands of years to biodegrade. Not fast enough for the rate at which we throw away things. We throw away things on human timescales: flat screen TVs once every 10 years, multiplied by several billion. Nature will never be able to biodegrade that much as fast as we’re throwing it away.
So what’s the solution?
It’s pretty hard to find a solution that’s going to capture and handle 100% of our trash. We would need to radically change our lives to make our waste sustainable. But there are some things you can to do start!
Step 1: Reduce as much as possible; Think about where the things you buy are going to end up. You’ll never have to throw away something you never had in the first place.
Step 2: Repair and reuse what you have, or deal with the disposal yourself! We need to start thinking like people did 200 years ago: when you buy a shirt, plan to have it for 10 years and repair it as it gets holes in it. Food scraps like bones or vegetable scraps? Those get made into stocks or soups. Is it compostable? Learn to compost! So many things get thrown away that could be easily fixed or re-used. Learn how to fix the things you already own. And if you don’t want to repair it? Maybe find someone out there who’s willing to take it off you hands so they can repair it and use it themselves. Try putting it on Craigslist or Ebay.
Step 3: Recycle. If you have to throw something away, find out if there’s a way to recycle it. Increasingly, we are going to have to start valuing resources that we already have and learn to extract the valuable metals and materials from the things we already have, like when we take the gold out of existing electronics to make new ones, or melt down plastics and glass to make new things.
After that, things get dicey. We will probably never reach a zero trash society, but we should strive to get as close to zero as possible. Not just for nature, but for us too.
Think a bit more about your trash. Please?
I hope this made some of you take a second thought about the soon-to-be-trash that you buy, and maybe even chose NOT to buy something because you decided you didn’t need enough to be worth putting into the environment for the next two thousand years.
Thanks for reading, everyone.
