Rethinking Garbage

Do you know where your local garbage dump is located? Have you ever been there? Few people have, but it is both informative and insightful to visit yours and see what happens to all the stuff you put in the can that gets picked up on your curbside each week.

Most municipal solid waste facilities (let's just call 'em dumps, 'cause that's what they really are) operate (accept garbage) from 30 to 50 years. My local dump opened a new facility in 2005 designed to accept 100 tons of garbage a day for the next 20 years. This is in a county of less than 30,000 residents. That's approximately six and a half pounds of garbage per person per day. The current fill rate indicates we may even be exceeding that amount. Why do we produce so much garbage? I've discussed this topic in a previous post, but have gained some new insights since then.

Recently, I moved just outside the city limits and no longer have the privilege of paying to have my garbage picked up by the city. Which means I either have to take it to the dump myself or pay a private firm to do it for me. I found it an eye opening experience to witness the dump firsthand. Of course there is the smell. But the overwhelming sensation was more like watching a family member being mugged, violated or beaten. The savage destruction of nature that takes place in a 'waste management facility' is visceral, disgusting and shameful. And we all bear responsibility.

Thankfully, my community has a pretty good recycling program, taking everything from cardboard to paper to plastics and glass. And if you separate out the glass, they will take everything else in a single stream. So I have three containers in my kitchen; one for all recycling (I remove the glass before the run to the dump), one for kitchen scraps that goes into the compost (more on that below) and one for everything else. The interesting aspect of this system is I find that the smallest volume ends up being the 'everything else' container, which is mostly plastic film (Saran Wrap), Ziploc bags and chip bags. I would guess that three-quarters by volume of what I take to the dump goes into the recycle bin.

The compost bucket collects all kitchen scraps except meat or bones (I'm a vegetarian, so that is not an issue), soft paper products such as used Kleenex and paper towels, fruit and vegetable skins and rinds, seeds, peels, coffee grounds and anything else that was recently alive (thus avoiding the classification issue with plastics, which are mostly petroleum products which technically were alive millions of years ago). I am amazed at the volume and weight of product that used to go to the landfill that now provides free (and organic) fertilizer for my garden. Of course, sending any kind of yard waste to the dump makes no sense whatsoever, so please stop putting grass clippings in bags for the garbage man unless your community has a specific composting program.

This is not the utopia I imagined in another post, but I think it is a big step in the right direction.

Private Land Ownership

If you think about if for a second, the concept of private land ownership is a strange one. Each of us is born into this world, one that has existed for billions of years before any of us show up on the scene, and at some point in our lives we draw an arbitrary boundary around an area on the landscape and say, "This is mine." I can't think of a better example of human conceit and self importance. Yet to consider all of the cruelties inflicted, rivers of blood spilled and whole societies destroyed throughout the ages over land disputes simply boggles the mind.

I understand that land ownership is all about control of what can be done on a particular parcel and who can do it. Usually it boils down to the use of resources contained within whatever arbitrary boundary seems relevant to the parties in control. All of our conventions of law and legal transfer of ownership are simply processes we have put in place to reduce the amount of conflict related to determining who gets to decide what happens within what arbitrary boundaries. But over most of human history, the deciding factor has been who has the most lethal weapons and the biggest army.

But the issue always comes back to the use (or in most cases misuse) of natural resources. Our society, and almost all societies in the world today, are based on the concept of land ownership, either private or public. Every square inch of the surface of the earth is owned by someone. Notable exceptions are Antarctica (the only landmass on Earth that has no native human populations and is protected by international treaty) and the world's oceans, twelve nautical miles beyond shore, although there are many international treaties, disagreements and exceptions even to this simple rule.

My main observation is that even within all the rules, regulations and practices imposed on a landowner by local, regional and even international laws, overuse and sometimes outright abuse of natural resources occur across the globe. The problem is that landowners no longer are the only ones to suffer from mismanagement of their land. Most environmental problems, such as deforestation, pollution and resource depletion have regional and sometimes global consequences.

So this post is more food for thought than a recommendation for specific action. How do we raise global awareness for the consequences of resource depletion? Or maybe more to the point, how do each of us become better stewards of the land that we do own? (I touched on this issue in a previous post). No matter if that is a condo in a densely populated urban area, a 1/4 acre in a suburban sub-division or a 50 acre homestead, I'm convinced all of us can do a better job as sustainable land owners.

As a soon-to-be steward of about 5 acres in rural New Mexico, here are a few questions I will be asking myself which I think we should all consider. How can I utilize native, less resource intensive (water, fertilizer, labor) plants? What can I do to encourage more native wildlife on my property? How can I accomplish the same benefit (enjoying a beautiful landscape) with less labor and resources? For example, gas powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers are not only noisy and polluting but very inefficient compared to gas powered cars. Reducing or eliminating their use is a huge step towards sustainability.

In order to accomplish meaningful change we need to throw out old assumptions. For example, why do we assume that every house in America should be landscaped with sod (even in desert regions like Las Vegas)? Break the mold, challenge convention and replace that ocean of bland grass with more interesting and native landscaping that requires less water and maintenance. What else can you do to become a better steward of the land you own?

Nature From Within

Humans are part of nature. Whether you live in a densely populated city or on a rural farm, you live in an ecosystem that consumes natural resources and supports many organisms, both plant and animal. We cannot escape this fact, whether we acknowledge it or not. In fact humans create many unnecessary problems when we do not recognize the consequences of our actions to the environment around us.

The blinding and isolating effects of "modern" society allow humans to pretend to live outside of nature in our artificial environments. We go to great lengths quite often to isolate ourselves from the world in which we live. Just look at our sealed and air conditioned homes and cars. Cellophane wrapped, boxed, frozen, freeze dried, vacuum packed food. Earbuds, "smart" phones, iPads, wall-sized TVs and other stimulation prosthetics.

We cause the most harm to the natural environment in which we all live through our own ignorance of the debilitating consequences of our activities. What was the complete effect on the environment caused by the purchase of that chicken sandwich you had for lunch? From building and operating the concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) that houses 100,000+ chickens under one roof from where your chicken breast was raised. To the effect of growing the grain the chicken was feed and the water that was pumped for it to drink to the waste it excreted during its short life. How about the processing plant where it was slaughtered, butchered and packaged? How about all the diesel fuel that was burned to ship and distribute the fertilizer, pesticide and seed to grow the grain and the grain itself? How about to ship the packaged chicken to the fast food distribution center and finally to the chain restaurant where you bought it? What are the effects on the environment for all the packaging both of the chicken feed, the antibiotics it was feed, the boxes in which the packaged chicken was shipped and finally all the packaging for everything else in your sandwich like the bun, the condiments, lettuce, tomatoes, etc.

And that is just for one chicken sandwich. Every single activity in which we participate every single day of our lives has direct, yet sometimes very hidden impacts on the environment from which we cannot escape no matter how hard we try. The more we pretend that we live outside of nature, instead of within it, the more harm we do to it and ultimately to ourselves.

The Cost of Mordern Farming

Current farming practices allow humans to produce more food per acre than was even imaginable 50 years ago. However, this huge gain in food production has a tremendous cost. Not only are these practices incredibly energy intensive but they rely on many toxic herbicides and pesticides which find their way into both our food chain as well as the environment at large.

Why is this a problem? In addition to the obvious issues with ingesting toxic substances, some of these chemicals are indicated as hormone mimics which can contribute to a whole host of issues from infertility to obesity to some forms of cancer. Moreover, the amount of fossil fuels required to grow a pound of food accounts for almost half of all costs considering the production, transportation and distribution of everything from the pesticides, to fertilizer to seed applied to an acre of a crop. Add in the tilling, plowing, seeding, watering, harvesting, processing, packaging and transporting of the crop itself and you can see that humans pay a very heavy price in energy consumption to achieve the fantastic levels of food production we currently enjoy.

But that is not the only cost incurred by our factory farming and mass food production practices. Most agriculture in the U.S. is now irrigated, and a significant amount by non-renewable aquifers like the Ogallala in the central plains. This one aquifer irrigates 30% of all irrigated land in the U.S. By the latest estimates, the deepest wells will start running dry in 25 - 30 years at current pumping rates. This is in an area that is already semi-arid and supported only a fraction of the amount of current agriculture before the massive pumping and irrigation from the aquifer.

Another hidden cost is the effect of both fertilizer and livestock excrement runoff into our nation's waterways. The excess nitrogen and other nutrients in this runoff causes excessive algae and bacterial blooms in rivers, streams and eventually the ocean. These blooms deprive the waterways of oxygen resulting in the die-off of whole ecosystems, from the micro-organisms all the way up the food chain to the fish and the mammal and bird predators who eat the fish.

Finally, in return for this incredible production of food, we have given up the two most important aspects of the food itself; its taste and nutritional value. Almost all fruits and vegetable hybrids sold in grocery stores today are bred for neither their taste nor their nutrient value but for their shelf life, color and hardiness for shipping and transport from the field to the store aisle. Unfortunately, taste and nutritional value are usually sacrificed for these other attributes. Like the large, beautiful rose hybird that has not even a hint of fragrance left, our fresh fruit and vegetables pale in taste and nutritional value compared to that which our grandparent's generation were accustomed.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with all of these practices is that they are not sustainable. Not just because we are using up all the water in the aquifers or all the oil to power the farm machinery and trucks, but the arable land whose topsoil is eroding away due to the very practices that squeeze so much food out of each and every acre. We have to try something different before we are forced to do so by the constraint of our limited resources.

Why Live Without Garbage?

How can we live our lives without creating any garbage? Or why should we want to? Because when we live the way we do, creating so much garbage, we are living unsustainably. The activities we pursue, the products we consume, the food that we eat, are all processes consuming resources faster than those resources are being replenished. This is true of the energy intensive agriculture required to fertilize, plant, harvest, process and tranport our food as well as the energy and resource intense processes to make and ship our consumer goods.

Garbage isn't the main problem (in itself it can be, and in some places is, a major issue) but garbage is a symptom. It is a symptom of the inefficiency of unsustainable processes. Whether we like it or not, the inescapable reality is that we all live on a world with limited resources. With 7 billion of us (and counting) we cannot continue to use resources as if they are unlimited. Besides possibly sunlight (see my post 'Sustainable Means What?') there are no unlimited resources. OK, maybe seawater is vast enough to be considered unlimited, but for what? Turning it into potable water takes enengy, and besides sunlight, we don't have an unlimited source of energy (a discussion of the problems with fusion energy has to wait for a future post).

More to the point, we need to improve the efficiency of all human activities to the point where they will all be sustainable. One way to do this is to minimize waste (i.e. garbage). Sometimes even this is not good enough because some other part of the process is consuming non-renewable resources such as petroleum. In this case we need to find alternative renewable resources.

But petroleum and other fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, etc.) have another strike against them. Not only will we soon (20 years for oil, 150 years for coal) have extracted and burned the easiest to reach reserves, but they contribute to global climate change. We simply cannot keep burning the same amount of fossil fuels for the next 150 years that we do today. The good news is we can't keep burning petroleum at that rate because we will run out of it soon. The bad news is humanity shows no signs of reducing the amount of coal we burn each year. In fact, we burn more coal each year than we did the previous one.

All the more reason to find alternatives. But since there is neither a simple alternative energy source nor an easy way to convert our energy infrastructure, one of the most effective interim solutions is to consume less fossil fuels. But as a whole humanity has been pretty bad at accomplishing this task. That is why I am not very hopeful that the human race will change its behavior enough to ward off environmental disaster.

So what does that mean for those of us who want to make a difference? The best answer I've come up with so far is learning how to live a sustainable, self-sufficient life. Live responsibly, live sustainably but most importantly, learn to live so that you are not dependant on any of the non-sustainable processes which will suffer crisis and ultimately break-down as the resources upon which they depend are consumed to an extent where those processes can no longer function.

My next post will be a preview of what life without garbage might look like and what that has to do with living a self-sufficent life.