Mountains of Waste

Visiting a landfill for the first time was certainly an eye-opening experience, widening my perspective on humanity’s most easily forgotten and arguably most destructive interaction with the environment; the disposal of waste. Almost every person living in a developed country contributes to the production of trash, yet few take this into consideration. As Fritjof Capra notes is his book The Web of Life, “most of us ... subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, interconnected world. (Capra 4)” The idea that trash just goes “away” when it’s disposed of is one of these outdated concepts that Capra mentions, and the creation of a landfill fits nicely with this idea of perception. Thousands of active landfills dot our nation from coast to coast, but the tens of thousands that have been completed filled are then covered by a thin layer of soil and grass over the years. This obscures them from the view of the general public, and once the problem of trash is out of sight, it’s out of mind as well.

      The thought that an increasing population and trash production will eventually leave us surrounded by mountains made of trash is disturbing in its own right, but more alarming is the potential harm of hazardous waste and chemicals. After a landfill is covered, to the untrained eye it appears to be a natural hill. New efforts are being made to build more secure foundations for new landfills, but the many local dumps and smaller landfills that existed in the times before modern waste management (roughly the 1980s) have makeshift liners and significantly less regulation than the current systems in use. Many of these older completed landfills have been developed on, and the transfer of harmful chemicals has been documented in past years. The transfer of chemicals to the environment is becoming an issue of more importance as population density increases, but as more and more people become aware of their ecological footprint in this “green revolution”, the move toward a more organized and less harmful waste disposal system quickens and hope remains to stop and eventually reverse the damage humans have caused to the planet. Overall, the practice of creating landfills had changed little until the turn of the century, when the green movement began to pick up pace. Attempts to move toward sustainability have been made in recent years, such as harvesting gas from the decomposition process, but there is still a long way to go. Discovering this, and then witnessing the act of a landfill being created made me realize the true importance of the production of waste, and the lack of awareness in the general community.