So after reading about the inner working of food I shifted to the other end. What happens to all the crap we throw away? I mean, I put out the trash can, it get emptied, I repeat next week. Well here’s your answer in these two tomes. One much more enjoyable to read than the other.
I’ll start with High Tech Trash. Interesting? Yes. A gripping read. Not really. So I took the time to get through the book. Let me tell you the jist of it. Don’t throw away your electronic trash. Oh, you more specific info from the book. Well okay.
CRT monitors can have up to 8lbs. of lead in them; the circuit boards have heavy metals and are made using toxic chemicals and loads of water. It’s getting easier but for the most part it’s very hard to try to recycle your electronic goods; or even to find out what’s in them -its proprietary. There are not set standards about labeling -Europe is way ahead of the US for now. Even if you recycle, in all but a few states where it is banned your shit is probably sent to China to be broken down. There they burn the plastic and separate it by smell, rivers are used to wash the refuse off, leftovers are piled on the banks of the river, basically you aren’t helping out the planet much more than if you put it all in your local landfill, you’re just moving the location of the pollution.
Depressed yet?
So what is the answer? Do you forever store your old crap in your closet? Well, Dell is doing a good job of accepting items for recycling (and it doesn’t even have to be things that they made.) Things are improving in the US but at a slow pace. The most encouraging thing in the book was about a mining company in the US that switched from mining the earth to mining recycled circuit boards because it is a much more reliable source of income. They can better predict the amount of metal they will pull out per ton of electronic goods and it is on average higher than when they dug into the earth. Surprising no?
One last word about recycling. If you do try and watch how they load your crap into the truck. If they just throw it in, you aren’t helping the environment any as broken electronics will allow water to leach out the chemicals and metals so they can flow into the soil and waterways.
Now Garbageland. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. The Author weighed and chronicled her trash during the project. The biggest revelation? Guests create the heaviest and messiest waste. On a side note, one time when my parents came to visit for a week the two of them filled up the garbage can every 1.5 - 2 days! I’m not sure how they did it as I was already separating out all the paper at the time. My wife and I with a baby only put out about 3 cans every two weeks.
So Royte lives in New York. She researches Fresh Kills on Staten Island (now closed) and rides along with her garbage men - it takes about a year to get used to lifting 5 tons a day, more if it’s raining. The way Twinkie delves into modern food preparation, Garbageland does the same for our trash. A lot of which is kept secret. Royte’s not sure why. She tries to get tours of landfills with little success. She details how many communities don’t want a landfill in their area but they want to be able to throw away their shit no problem. Well it has to go somewhere!
In the end Royte talks about composting (hard in an apartment) and not really easy to do for the average person to keep the material at the correct temperature and well rotated; recycling - how most Americans are to lazy to separate their trash so single stream is the way to go; how no one likes to do glass (my own neighborhood only has dumpsters for paper, metal, numbers 1 +2 plastic, the other numbers are harder to recycle). At the end she talks about the holy grail of garbage. Zero waste. She interviews a few people who are just about there. In reality it probably has a lot to do with how you buy and how zealous you are to recycle your purchases. Impossible to achieve? Apparently not. Yeah I’m not one of them. But for now as least I’m better than my neighbors if the trash on the curb is any indicator.
It is interesting to note that nowadays people get anxiety that they are not green enough. Here is an article from Time magazine that makes fun of this phenomenon. It’s Inconvenient Being Green
