Waste Not..

The Roseland and Reader pieces on waste reduction and recycling provided, once again, insights and guidance regarding the way we handle our materials as communities. Waste production is a topic that I find particularly interesting and compelling. Given the extent of our “growth mania” it surprises me how quickly this externality of our lifestyles is forgotten. Perhaps this is because we assume that when the garbage truck comes, all of our expendables are no longer our problem. We pay for our responsibility to be absolved when we pay our sewage and waste removal bills. But this concept that we can throw something “away” is one that resounds in this topic, along with our treatment of water that we discussed previously in class. We quickly forget that we are in a closed system, albeit a very large one, and the waste we produced goes somewhere. But what would the implications be if we dealt with our own waste? If our closed system was much closer to home – say our backyards, would we, as a society, be so quick to opt for the garbage can rather than compost bin? Would we alter our purchasing behavior knowing that we would have to live with the build up of non-degradable packaging and products on our property? Perhaps this would increase the practice of the two forgotten R's – reduce and reuse. I know that since I have had to drive to the recycle center, rather than suffer the luxury of curbside pickup, I have been more conscious about reusing items and opting for reduced-packaging items (thank you Amazon).

However, given the realities of our society and the buildup we've created there is a need to address the waste that has already been produced (in tandem with our reduction practices). One way to do this is to convert the waste into energy.... While incineration and methane produced during waste degradation are used to convert garbage into something of use to society, they are not the ideal solution to our trash woes. One company in Japan is venturing toward an interesting technology that converts plastic resin back into oil – one of many initiatives set on solving the problem of plastics.

The catchment and recycling of our sewage can also be used to convert the linear metabolism of the built environment into a closed loop system. Phosphorus stores are being rapidly depleted while we shift nitrogen and phosphorus out of the agricultural systems and into the sewage systems that go on to contaminate water supplies and feed algal blooms that destroy ecosystems and their biota. Treating sewage locally can restore these life-sustaining nutrients to the systems that are desperate for them.

Another topic within this arena that I find disconcerting is the fames Garbage Patch floating in the North Pacific Gyre, plaguing all the ecosystems with which it comes into contact. For further information see

Plague of Plastics Chokes the Seas

and

Stephen Colbert's interview with Captain Charles Moore, who discovered the gyre.