Modern Waste is an Economic Strategy

Modern waste is fundamentally different from its predecessors. From the turn of the twentieth century and into the 1950s, first in the United States, then elsewhere, waste began to increase in tonnage, gain in toxicity, and become more heterogeneous (MacBride 2012: 174). It also started to play a pivotal role as an industrial strategy for growth and profit. About ninety-seven percent of waste produced in the US today is industrial solid waste (ISW) produced during processes such as mining and mass agriculture. The remaining three percent is what we usually think of when we think of garbage: municipal solid waste (MSW) (EPA 1999; MacBride 2012: 87-88). While this split is crucial for shifting attention to the scalar dynamics of waste, I want to argue that when municipal solid waste—that which you and I throw away—is considered within its material, economic and historical context, it too can be categorized as industrial solid waste.

Charts: What Your Trash Reveals About the World Economy

"The fastest way to reduce solid waste volumes is to have a recession," writes World Bank urban specialist Dan Hoornweg in a report on the state of trash in cities. Hoornweg elegantly sums up why garbage is and will remain a vexing problem. Here in the United States, we hear "zero waste" and think sanctimonious yuppies. Yet much of the world's population is too poor to buy—and throw away—much stuff in the first place. But as developing countries become wealthier and adopt higher standards of living, they're also following our wasteful lead.

Effects of Consumerism

Richard Robbins is worth quoting at length on the impact of consumption on the environment and on people.

"William Rees, an urban planner at the University of British Columbia, estimated that it requires four to six hectares of land to maintain the consumption level of the average person from a high-consumption country. The problem is that in 1990, worldwide there were only 1.7 hectares of ecologically productive land for each person. He concluded that the deficit is made up in core countries by drawing down the natural resources of their own countries and expropriating the resources, through trade, of peripheral countries. In other words, someone has to pay for our consumption levels.

… Our consumption of goods obviously is a function of our culture. Only by producing and selling things and services does capitalism in its present form work, and the more that is produced and the more that is purchased the more we have progress and prosperity. The single most important measure of economic growth is, after all, the gross national product (GNP), the sum total of goods and services produced by a given society in a given year. It is a measure of the success of a consumer society, obviously, to consume.

However, the production, processing, and consumption, of commodities requires the extraction and use of natural resources (wood, ore, fossil fuels, and water); it requires the creation of factories and factory complexes whose operation creates toxic byproducts, while the use of commodities themselves (e.g. automobiles) creates pollutants and waste. Yet of the three factors environmentalists often point to as responsible for environmental pollution — population, technology, and consumption — consumption seems to get the least attention. One reason, no doubt, is that it may be the most difficult to change; our consumption patterns are so much a part of our lives that to change them would require a massive cultural overhaul, not to mention severe economic dislocation. A drop in demand for products, as economists note, brings on economic recession or even depression, along with massive unemployment."

Following Garbage's Long Journey Around The Earth

Americans generate more trash than anyone else on the planet: more than 7 pounds per person each day.

About 69 percent of that trash goes immediately into landfills. And most landfill trash is made up of containers and packaging — almost all of which should be recycled, says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes,

"It's instant trash," he says. "We pay for this stuff, and it goes right into the waste bin, and we're not capturing it the way our recycling programs are intending us to capture it. We're just sticking it in the ground and building mountains out of it."

Humes' new book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash follows the journey that trash takes as it makes its way from garbage containers through landfills, sanitation plants and scrap heaps. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that because much of our trash is immediately hidden from our daily lives, it's easier for us to be wasteful.

TRASH POLLUTION

Marine debris, also called marine trash, is any human-made solid material that is disposed of or abandoned on beaches, in waterways that lead to the ocean, or in the ocean itself, regardless of whether disposal occurred directly, indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally. Dead seaweed, shells, carcasses or other naturally-produced materials are not included.

Marine debris, including plastics, paper, wood, metal and other manufactured materials is found on beaches worldwide and at all depths of the ocean. About 60%-80% of all marine debris is composed of plastic (Rios et al. 2007) and Ocean Conservancy's Trash Free Seas Alliance estimates that 8 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean each year.

About 80% of marine debris originates from sources on land and the other 20%, about 636,000 tons per year, comes from ocean vessels (US Department of Commerce 1999; Ramirez-Llodra et al. 2011). Cruise ships represent only 1% of marine vessels, but produce about 25% of ship-sourced waste; on average, a single cruise passenger produces 3.5 kg of waste per day (Butt 2007).

A useful general overview of marine trash pollution is found here.

The Trash Vortex

The trash vortex is an area the size of Texas in the North Pacific in which an estimated six kilos of plastic for every kilo of natural plankton, along with other slow degrading garbage, swirls slowly around like a clock, choked with dead fish, marine mammals, and birds who get snared. Some plastics in the gyre will not break down in the lifetimes of the grandchildren of the people who threw them away.

Ocean Trash: 5.25 Trillion Pieces and Counting, but Big Questions Remain

The numbers are staggering: There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269,000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea.

Scientists call these statistics the "wow factor" of ocean trash. The tallies, published last year in three separate scientific papers, are useful in red-flagging the scope of the problem for the public. But beyond the shock value, just how does adding up those rice-size fragments of plastic help solve the problem?

Although scientists have known for decades about the accumulating mass of ocean debris and its deadly consequences for seabirds, fish, and marine animals, the science of sea trash is young and full of as-yet unsolved mysteries. Almost nothing was known about the amount of plastic in remote regions of the Southern Hemisphere, for example, until last year because few had ever traveled there to collect samples. (Related: "With Millions of Tons of Plastic in Oceans, More Scientists Studying Impact.")

"The first piece is to understand where it is," says Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

What the funk stinks?