In the old days, people’s garbage was taken to the edge of town and burned.  For historical interest, part of the original dump for the City of Key West is now underneath the AIDS Memorial at the end of White Street. 

The first landfill was established in Fresno, California in 1935. Today, according to the EPA, there are 10,000 landfills in the United States!  While some are inactive, such as Mount Trashmore, they are still an environmental concern and while there are fewer active landfills, we are putting more garbage into them than ever before.  In the United States, we produce and average of 4.5 pounds of garbage for every man, woman and child EVERY DAY.  If you do the math of multiplying 4.5 x 300,000,000 people x 365 days in the year, you get almost a half trillion pounds of garbage! 


The Land Of Away
Much has been made of our sometimes dissatisfaction with Waste Management.  Make no mistake, they are not the culprits here.  They are simply the answer to a really inconvenient, subliminal question we ask every time we buy and use something.  What do I do with the packaging?  We put our garbage out on the sidewalk and it mysteriously disappears to … “The land of away.”  Nothing could be more wrong.

Plastics, like diamonds, are forever.  If Christopher Columbus had brought a Styrofoam cup to the New World, it would still be here.  It takes 500 years for Styrofoam to break down and we don’t even know into what.  The Bic lighter that we casually throw into the garbage can when we’re finished with it is estimated to have a breakdown period numbered in the thousands of years.  Where paper or organic material can break down in a matter of weeks, an aluminum can will take between 200 and 400 years, the plastic 6-pack holder will take 450 years. Cigarette butts, which are cellulose, a form of plastic, can take up to 25 years to break down (not to mention the release of the cadmium, lead and arsenic they have filtered).  U.S. families discard a staggering 20 billion diapers each year which take an estimated 250 to 500 years to break down!

We use landfills because they are the cheapest alternative … for now.  What we need to understand is that we are really borrowing the real cost from future generations who will pay the price for methane gas emissions, leachate contaminated ground water and a host of health problems two terrible to contemplate.  Today, over one billion people do not have access to clean water.  Why are we in such a hurry to join them?

Not possible, you say?  Many of the landfills are now being lined with clay and have “state of the art” methane gas processors on them.  Many don’t work and some are not so equipped.   Methane gas is many times more detrimental to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide emissions, both of which seek to destroy the protective ozone layer.  Landfills are not compost piles, they are oxygenless dead zones where water accumulates over decades and soon to be centuries.  As the water filters through landfills, it creates leachates which carry some of the deadliest toxins known to man, straight down into the groundwater.  This is happening right now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Toronto, Canada has outlawed landfills.  So, guess what they do with their garbage? You got it!  They send 400 trucks a day to Michigan landfills and, according to the Canadian government, there is nothing we can do about it as it is part of the NAFTA relationship between our two countries.  If we’re paying attention, we should be outraged.

The largest manmade “structure” on planet earth is not the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids in Egypt.  It is the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island at 2,200 acres and higher than the Statue of Liberty and clearly visible from space.

Of course, all of this talk about how bad landfills are, both now and in the future, begs the question, what is the alternative?  At once, that question is both simple and complicated.  The answer is, we need to first reduce what we are using.  When we can’t reduce it, we need to figure out a way to re-use it.  If you can’t do one of these two things, then we need to recycle or compost. 

Over 30% of what is hauled out of Key West is biodegradable and, many times, compostable matter such as food and yard waste.  Recycling is a last resort of taking items that have served their useful purpose but can be restructured into new products.  If you think really hard about it, and I’m being facetious here, I’m sure we can all think of ways to reduce or re-use many of the things we throw away and, in the last case, throw it in one bucket instead of another so it can be recycled.  This, then, will be the topic for the next column, “Throw up our hands, or act?”  The Four Rs.

Chris Belland
Love Your Island Co-Chair