Recycling and Other Solutions to the Trash Problem

Recycling and Other Solutions to the Trash Problem

And so we come to the end of our third week of American Agenda. When we began, we said we would focus on issues in our national life which are more important than others and therefore worth more attention. We also said, these issues were important because there were choices which needed to be made. Tonight is no exception. But unlike many other issues we’ve explored already this problem is so commonplace, most people just don’t see it. Of course, we’ll not be able to miss the consequences. Here is Ned Potter.

This is where the story ends, on top of a landfill in Candon County, New Jersey. Sneakers, phonebooks, diapers, shopping bags, soda bottles piled up and shuffled under.

‘We have a throw-away society where many products have a useful life of only a few minutes.’

The problem is that what makes our lives convenient is burying us. Americans discard two and half million plastic containers an hour, we generate two and a half million pounds of trash every five minutes – that’s a billion pounds every day, twice as much per person as in any other country on Earth. Take the Bargoween family, they live a few miles from that landfill in Candon County. They buy paper napkins, paper towels, paper tissue. Paper is the item we toss out most. They buy food in plastic bottles that survive in landfills for centuries. A third of what the Bargoweens discard is merely packaging.

And despite the environmental movement each of us produces 15% more garbage than we did in 1960. Is there anyone to blame?

Industry says, it just gave consumers what they wanted. ‘A plastic container is lighter in weigh, it’s more convenient to handle and it’s safer.’

It’s also cheaper for the maker. Perhaps, he says, a plastic bottle costs 30 to 40% less than glass.

80% of our trash goes into landfill, but engineers say, most of the current sites nationwide will be used up within a decade. Is this our fate to be buried in our own debris? For all our worrying the list of solutions is awfully short. We can look for the new landfill, but even if we find it, that pollutes the ground. We can burn garbage, perhaps even for energy, but that pollutes the air. We can change packaging, make plastics biodegradable, so they’ll dissolve in soil, but that’s expensive. We can reduce the amount of garbage, but only by giving up a lot of conveniences.

Or we can recycle. It certainly doesn’t solve the entire problem, but it’s the best solution at the moment, and not because of social consciousness, or fear, or government regulation, but because it makes money.

In Candon County a private company has made recycling convenient and profitable. Firms like this are springing up all over America. Workers separate the clear glass from the tinder, the aluminum from the tin. Landfills may charge a town a hundred dollars to accept a ton of trash, the recycling company charges the town nothing, because it sells the end product to firms that will use it again. Thirteen hundred dollars for a ton of high-grade aluminum!

A hundred miles away recycling reaches its grandest proportions. Just across New York Harbour from Manhattan, Pontiacs and subway cars chopped up into this size pieces, loaded on cargo ships bound for Asia. A ship load of scrap will sell for millions of dollars.

‘Scrap is the number-one or number-two export from the port of New York almost every year. Basically, our Chevis are going over to become Toyotas.’

Today we recycle only 10% of our garbage. We could push that to 50%, if we really tried, but that’s close to the practical limit: 40% of our waste cannot be re-used. So we have to return to the tougher choices – use less and waste less.

‘If we don’t get started solving these problems in the next 10 years, our problems will be awesome.’

And in only five years, if we do nothing, that landfill where our story began will be full. Then what?

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04