Do you ever wonder where your trash goes after you bag it up and leave it at the curb?
LRS, our local trash handler, promises us that its process is entirely sustainable.
According to the company’s website, household recyclables are sorted, separated and sent to mills across North America to be transformed into new commodities. It also has promised to achieve net-zero business operations by 2040, meaning that it plans to reduce to nothing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by its operations and to convert to electric vehicles.
The end result is that LRS claims to divert up to 40% of material that would normally be taken to landfills, with the other 60% being sold to be repurposed as raw material.
Although we have sufficient reason to be confident in the ultimate whereabouts of our own recyclables here at home in DeKalb, elsewhere in the world, there are a multitude of concerns about the end result of these programs.
According to the book “Waste Wars” by Alexander Clapp, the global trash industry employs a variety of methods for disposing of trash in various countries such as Ghana, Indonesia and Turkey. Moving waste has been said to offer jobs and cash and resources to emerging nations, and distributes pollution levels more evenly across the globe. It claims to turn useless trash into economic input, but it often exploits global inequalities to save money, not the planet.
Electronic waste is currently the world’s fastest-growing type of garbage. In a market slum of Ghana called Agbogbloshie, a repository of electronics operated for many years that includes sensitive information that has been recovered from second-hand computers. For the FBI, the slum is a den of identity thieves. Yet a lucrative market exists there in the harvesting of electronic spare parts.
Shipbreaking is a lucrative trade. It offers up tons of steel that can be melted down and put into new infrastructures in developing countries. In the late 1980s, Turkey emerged as the best location for dismantling. Once melted, the steel is used to build. The country also exports its finished steel, making it one giant steel factory for the rest of the world. It has been converted to political power, keeping the highest officials in office year after year.
Marine biologists have studied the effect of plastics on the oceans. For every pound of plankton caught by Charles Moore as he sailed through the Northeast Pacific, he discovered 6 pounds of plastic. And so was discovered the Pacific Garbage Patch, which is three times the size of France.
For every human alive right now, there exists a ton of discarded plastic out there somewhere. William Haynes, an American chemical economist and historian, in 1942 is quoted as saying, “Plastic would have more effect on the lives of our great-grandchildren than [Adolf] Hitler or [Benito] Mussolini.”
“Nothing can stop plastic” was the cry of the president of the Society of the Plastic Industry in April 1946 at the first annual National Plastics Exposition in New York.
Indonesia imports waste paper and has become one of the world’s largest paper producers. However, up to 40% of nonpaper (plastic) has infiltrated the paper supply before it arrives. As a result, trash towns have been constructed to handle that plastic waste. From there, it is trucked to factories that use it for fuel. While this translates to economic prosperity for towns once dedicated to growing rice, it also has resulted in one mafia-type family ruling over local politics. The toxins from those contaminants once burned also have infiltrated local food supplies.
There is a myth created by the petrochemical industry: “You just need to recycle it.” But science has never proven that it is possible to efficiently convert old plastic into new plastic. Recycling never prevents final disposal, it only delays it. The additional problem is all the contaminants still stewing within plastic containers that are put out for recycling. Nothing is ever getting rinsed out, it’s just getting mixed in.
The reason that trash is a problem is that we are a consumer society that constantly consumes and produces the garbage in the first place. The best solution to that is to be careful with our buying choices.
- Julie Jesmer is the chair of the DeKalb Citizens’ Environmental Commission.