Trash & (Zero) Waste in a Disposable World

Contextualizing the Unpalatable

         The idea of throwing out a piece of trash or recycling a bottle seems quite simple on the surface. However, I didn’t quite realize how intricate the world of trash and landfills really is. Similarly, my photo of a gas pump that essentially sucks the methane released from trash underground is a process I didn’t even know existed. Years ago, I had previously visited a landfill on a school trip and prior to this field trip I thought that I more or less knew what to expect. However, the sheer magnitude of how large some of the hills were was enough to prove me otherwise. Even more so, I didn’t know how many precautionary measures were being taken every day to make recycling as efficient as possible. Often times with a subject matter such as trash and recycling, when people throw around statistics and facts with ridiculously large sums of numbers, the effect is lost. After the tour of the landfill though, things have been contextualized for me. Although my brain still cannot exactly wrap itself around the idea of a million pounds of trash in one place, I learned many things that were more palatable, yet still just as astonishing. For example, recycling one can of coca-cola can produce enough energy to run a television for three and a half hours. After visiting both the landfill and the recycling center I will now always try my hardest to make a conscious effort to reduce, reuse and recycle. As much as I want others to recycle as well though, I don’t think I’ll ever stop a stranger in their tracks because they threw something out that could have been recycled instead.
         Fritjof Capra writes in his book The Web of Life: “The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realize that they cannot be understood in isolation.” This idea is applicable on multiple levels, especially to my very first point. Certain small actions within a field of science can have large outcomes on that same field of science, but even more so, those large actions can have even more adverse effects on the scientific community as a whole, which can effect peripheral communities and their ethics, values and morals, which can then effect the entire world in some way or another. This globally objective view can be summed up metaphorically as a Russian doll. However, unlike a Russian doll, we really don’t know how broad this scientific idea may be. A century ago we lived by a different paradigm where the ecological awareness we have now was non-existent, so for all we know we are still missing out on part of the equation.