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One of the most difficult problems of the contemporary world is the ever-growing amount of waste created each year. Some people in the West ironically call their society the throw away society. For many years people thought that endless resources would allow them to produce an endless supply of goods and bottomless landfills would allow to dispose of an endless stream of waste. But now humankind is beginning to drown in that stream.
All solid waste can be divided into three categories: household (municipal) waste, which is generated in our houses at a rate of one ton per person each year; hazardous waste (toxic chemicals, medical waste, heavy metals and nuclear waste), which is now being produced in the same quantities as household waste and industrial waste, which is created at a rate of one ton per week for every woman, man and child so taking into account all these categories, every person in the developed countries produces more than twice his weight in waste every year.
The majority of the rubbish, approximately 80%, is disposed in landfills, about 15% is incinerated and only 5% is recycled.
Many of us grew in the assumption that there always be a hole wide enough and deep enough to take care of all our trash. But this assumption was wrong. The volume of trash is now so high that many countries are running out of places to put it. Many landfills are packed to capacity and closed. Those still in operation look like huge mountains of trash. For example, the large landfill near New York City, which receives 44 million pounds of garbage every single day, is so high that it may soon legally require a Federal Aviation Administration permit as a threat to aircrafts.
And what are these mountains of garbage? Various forms of paper, mostly newspapers, mail order catalogs, telephone books and packaging take up approximately half the space. Another 20% percent is made up of construction wood and organic waste, especially food. (15% of all food, purchased by Americans ends up in landfills. The rest consists of plastic waste (mostly plastic bottles and film), metals and glass and a conglomeration of odds and ends.
Scientists believed that paper and food would eventually decompose in landfills, but that was not so. Specialists called garbologists, who explored the landfills, recovered the hot-dogs, buried their several decades ago, which were not touched by the process of decomposition! This can be explained by the lack of oxygen in landfills. Various microorganisms called decomposers can’t do their work in such conditions.
But when the organic waste does ultimately decompose, a great deal of methane is produced. This poses a threat of explosions and underground fires in dumps, which do not have proper ventilation. Landfills release large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which contributes to the global warming.
Most industrial waste is disposed of on the sites owned by the generator often next to the facility that creates the waste. But the technology for disposing waste has not caught up with the technology of producing it.
Some countries, which have run out places to dump waste, try to export garbage to the less developed countries. Several years ago an American ship, loaded with the toxic ash from the incinerator, sailed to the costs of Africa and Asia, searching for the place to get rid of its load. After a two-year journey it finally disposed the ash on the shore of Asia.
Some officials in California wanted to organize regular shipments of their solid waste to the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. Officials in Baltimore were negotiating with China fir permission to dump their municipal waste in Tibet.
Developing countries have their own problems with waste, especially in the large and growing cities. In Cairo, for example, people put garbage on the roofs to decompose in the sun. One can imagine the smell, filling the streets and houses in this city! In many third world cities untreated sewage and garbage flows freely in the gutters and streets. Piles of garbage are picked over by legions of poor men and women and children. These conditions lead to massive outbreaks of cholera.
In the Philippines a growing mountain of trash – called Smokey Mountain in a suburb of Manila has become a kind of a waste city. 25000 people live in cardboard huts there. They stake out territories in the midst of the waste, even though they and their children are choking on smoke from the fires, fuelled by decomposition.
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