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.
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Taking it one step further
Garbage is more a side effect that we want to pass on to the poor sod next in line
This is true. But we pay for that someone to deal with it. Where I live it can be recycled, composted, or burned for electricity. Landfills are the last resort.
Lol I literally just watched the same documentary today. It was good (and horrifying), but I really hated the AI voice gimick they used. It probably could’ve reduced the playtime by 15 minutes if they removed those parts.
We should have a device to yeet our garbage into a black hole to fix this issue.
Assuming our universe turns out to be inside of a black hole, it’s possible that you’d potentially be yeeting your garbage into someone else’s universe. Ideally we have all universes yeet there garbage into the one we dedicated to garbage. Then the people at the end of time can deal with that instead of us. Although it’d be much more energy efficient to change compositions of matter than maintain an active black hole, so recycling may still be optimal over tossing your banana peel.
This was the plot of one of the latest Futurama episodes. Instead of general trash it was clothes
There was a story from the child book author Thomas Brezina (Austrian), who wrote the series “Knickerbocker Bande”, which is about 4 childs/teens, who do some detective work and solve stuff.
I absolutely loved that series as a child and I’ve read like…I don’t know dozens of them
(After that he created ‘Tom Turbo’ which was more meant for a younger audience)Anyway, I had a audiobook cassette, which was about a killed scientist, that created “Müllmampfer” (stuff the eats trash) and it would just eat it and it’s gone with that
I’m still having that song in my ear after more than 30 years
“Müllmampfer, Müllmampfer,
die Welt, die braucht Müllmampfer.
Sie fressen jeden Abfall auf und Abfall gibt es hier zu Hauf!”Roughly translated: "Trash-Eater, Trash-Eater,
The world, it needs Trash-Eaters.
They eat all the trash and there is a abundance of trash’So, even 30 years ago, we all were aware of this problem
But as always, capitalism wins, because we need to create new stuff, else the economy can’t grow - and as we all know, infinite growth in a finite system isn’t possibleI’m also remembering stories from my school time (in a technical high school), where they told us, that Phillips just trashed completely newly produced DVD players, because selling them at lower prices, would have crashed the market and would have brought in a net negative for their future products.
Long story, short:
This system is just not sustainable in any way…You know, I just realized how removed I am from German as a language.
I saw those lyrics and in my head I couldn’t help but read it in the voice and musical style of Rammstein.
That sounded pretty good, too.
But I also realized I don’t really have any other exposure to German, outside of singular scenes in some movies or tv-shows.
To be fair, in such child songs there are often words used, that aren’t really common in daily live - besides sometimes when talking with children, but mostly they are there for the rhyme
‘Mampfer’ is just roughly translated as Eater, which would be more ‘Esser’
‘mampfen’ is better translated as munch(-ing)
So, Trashmuncher probably should have been the better translationAlso the rhyme with ‘zu Hauf’ comes from ‘Haufen’, which is a pile
The edge of the continent curls over, everything gets dragged into the elemental garbage disposal of grinding rock and lava. Cities, cars, forests, buildings, everything. It takes a couple million years. But ya, everything gets digested. I think they call it the subduction zone.
Also, someday we will invent nanotrees. Plant them on ancient landfills. Bear fruit of pure iron, aluminum, gold. There is wealth there.
True … there is no real problem for the planet … or the universe for that matter … everything comes and goes and appears and disappears eventually.
The problems are relative to our human species within our few thousand or millions of years of existence, which will probably be shortened because of wasteful habits.
Tbf, some of it would be broken down and dealt with by fungus, there are some that can eat through some plastics.
So not necessarily a person
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.
