I was watching the documentary “Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy” on Netflix and heard this comment when discussing waste generated from consumerism.
It made me realize, yes we don’t throw garbage “away” because away doesn’t exist … we just pass it on for someone else to deal with. Sometimes that next person might not deal with it right away but eventually someone has to deal with it.
In the past, humans and then small communities would dig a hole and bury their waste
Now we have larger communities, so we make a larger hole called a landfill. Same concept and process. Yes, consumption is killing the planet, but pretending landfills don’t a) exist and b) accomplish the exact same thing that all waste filled holes have throughout history is strange. Even other animals bury their waste.
The difference is the amount of trash and that more of it is not organic, so will not break down. A small hole in someone’s garden, which largely decomposes over a few decades, is a very different thing than a mountain filled with trash that stays there for the next generations.
For example, groundwater can get contaminated by landfills, if they’re badly planned, or when an earthquake tears the ground under them apart.
Alternately, properly managed and centralized trash disposal eliminates pollution from multiple spread out trash holes. Assume the composition of the trash is the same, and it clearly makes sense to centralize the trash collecting and minimize the area impacted by it. The problem is the plastic composition, not the existence of landfills
Yeah, we’re not arguing against landfills as a general concept. But they’re still basically the least bad solution, when all the good solutions don’t apply or got ignored.
Not producing that garbage in the first place is the big one. Most products in supermarkets are wrapped in trash, even though lots of them could be sold in reusable containers, or at least in biodegradable or recyclable containers. But burying trash underground is assigned a lower price than sending reusable containers back to manufacturers, so that’s what every company does.