Speaking of garbage...

Lately, it would be fair to say that garbage is being shoved down my throat, figuratively of course. I have been inundated with information about our garbage problem from speakers, documentaries and books. After visiting the landfill a couple of weeks ago I started re-reading the book Cradle to Cradle. Author William McDonough's tag line for this book is "remaking the way we make things". In essence, this book addresses using quality designs to make products that will last and keep these products out of landfills. If you can't design something that functions well from the beginning, then working with the infrastructures that are currently in place is the next best thing--this is what my work is doing.

My workplace has become a Green Star School, meaning that we strive to become a zero-waste school. Each room is equipped with a compost bin, co-mingled container bin, paper recycle bin and yes, a garbage bin. During the initial process of becoming a Green Star School Eco-cycle, the local recycling center, trains students and staff on how to recycle/compost via talks and guided lunch-room help. In the lunch room we switched back to the old school re-usable plastic lunch trays and actual silverware. It is also worth mentioning that we have an amazing school lunch program headed up by Ann Cooper who is a Jamie Oliver-esque food activist and chef.

How else is garbage being stuffed down the hatch? Two newish documentaries, Dive! and Bag It offer a palpable, entertaining and sometimes humorous journey through the American waste sector. I saw a screening of Dive! with a Q & A session by director Jeremy Seifert after the movie. Dive! documents Seifert learning to dumpster dive for food in LA. At times, he desperately tries to find a use for the food that is thrown away. Throughout the course of the film Seifert exposes the immensely wasteful American food production system. Although the movie makes you want to stake out your local dumpsters and start eating for free, that is hardly the point. I think Seifert is trying to show us just how much food is wasted, think about where our food comes from and stop food from being wasted to begin with. The movie does a nice job of shedding light on yet another important piece of industrial food complex in the US.
Bag It is a movie about plastic. The beginning of the movie focuses on the life of plastic bags. Plastic bags are one of the most widely used and disposed of items. We use them for a few minutes and then toss them out. The movie discusses some of the chemicals that are used in these bags including phthalates and BPAs. The narrator of this documentary and his partner find out during the movie that they are having a child. After this, the movie looks into the ways that these two chemicals affect the human body and development. I am sure the American Chemistry Council might have some things to say about the narrator's perspective. The most heartbreaking part of the movie is about the damage that plastics are doing to ocean-dwelling animals--particularly those that live near ocean gyres of which there are 5 in the world. You might have heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? You know, the one that is filled 3.5 millions tons of garbage? The movie shows us just what this garbage patch looks like--a plastic soup that fills the bellies of countless animals and kills them. While you watch the movie you might be thinking to yourself, well, what about recycling? Bag It shows that recycling is a double edge sword. It is a band-aid we are using for the creation of all this plastic waste. And why is all this garbage being created to begin with?

Annie Leonard shares her viewpoint on consumerism and waste in her short video called The Story of Stuff. I am betting many of you have seen this oldie but goody that is totally worth the 20 minutes to watch it again and share it with people who have not seen it. Our waste will continue to haunt us until we can find a better and more sustainable means of production. I don't know about you but I don't want anymore blood from the of suffering animals, ecosystems and other countries on my hands just because I am an American.

The Dump: Where Food Goes After We Eat It

In order to talk about food and especially when it comes to improving our food systems, we have to address waste as well. Recently, I took a field trip to the Denver Regional Landfill, Western Disposal and Eco-cycle. Sure, I would have eventually gone on my own, but instead, escorted a busload of middle school kids who would rather, at any cost, talk about sex, than investigate garbage--I cannot blame them. However, the kids and I would probably agree that a bad day at the dump is better than a good day at the school and even though this was a math field trip (using very little math), we all learned a little something about waste.

Stopping first at a giant green tube that had a mirage floating above it, an engineer who works at the landfill, described how it works. Every proper (as in, legal) landfill in the US starts by digging a giant hole, lining it with clay and then plastic. Once you have a lined hole in the ground, you can start throwing garbage into it. As the garbage settles, the ground sinks, you bury the old garbage, then throw more garbage on top of that. Over time, a methane-filled liquid sludge settles on the bottom of the garbage hole. It is piped out through a well, stored in a tank and then burned to "reduce greenhouse gas emissions." Beginning in October, a month after this landfill closes for good, the methane will start being pumped to a combustion engine. This engine will power a wind turbine that will feed energy back to the grid. After asking the engineer what the by-product of burning methane is, he told me CO2. Isn't CO2 a greenhouse gas--the gas that most scientist agree is THE bane of all evil in our modern, toxic world? The engineer assured me that methane, which breaks apart our ozone layer, is much worse than CO2. Hmmm, the garbage problem we face is bigger and more complex than meets the eye. This landfill receives 8 MILLION POUNDS OF TRASH PER DAY. Of this, 60% is paper, 15% is plastic--in other words 85% of the garbage could be recycled. This dump has a lifespan of 31 years and the owner (oh yeah, private owners make a killing off of their landfills) is responsible for the dump 30 years after it closes.

Next we would drive to the Western Disposal which is the transfer center for Boulder's garbage. Here we got a close up look at a Boulder's garbage being loaded onto the truck. The kids were psyched at the quality of things thrown into the piles and if the site's supervisor hadn't been present, they would have been foraging through the piles. One of my students found a tennis racket and another was pretty happy about taking home a piece of rebar--whatever makes you happy, you know? Western Disposal also has a winning compost program. Residents have special bins at their house to throw food and yard waste scraps into. Once at Western's site the contents of those yard and food waste bins are turned into compost and that is sold back to the public.


Our last and final stop was Eco-cycle recycling center where we got a chance to see how recyclables are processed for our county. We are lucky to have a single stream recycling where all recyclables go into one bin and people and machines sort the goods at the plant. After the plastic, glass, metals and paper stop here, they are sold to places that up-cycle them into new materials like the counter-top and bathroom stalls pictured below.

Now, if we could just figure out how to get the 85% of garbage that is not being recycled into our recycling centers we might have a standing chance at a future with 7 million people on the planet. But then, there is still the environmental degradation of mining for these goods to begin with and the toxic chemicals used to produce and reproduce goods. More on that later.