FSEM visits the landfill

                              Trash Class Goes to the Landfill

Before visiting the Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site I never imagined that there could be so much trash. When we were at DADS there was an overwhelming amount of waste that filled multiple “mountains”. All that trash comes from about 800 trucks a day that continuously bring in more and more trash to dump. The picture I chose was at the top of one of the landfills and it was of a truck having its trailer detached and hoisted in the air so that all of its trash could be spilled on top of a larger pile. The trucks come in and drop off all the garbage they have and then they go to collect more just to come drop it off again. This whole process is making me nervous about what we are going to do in the future. The tour guide said that DADS is one of the few landfills with a lot of space left and that if we continue at this rate, we have about 130 years left until it’s full. 130 years is not as much time as it seems and what does that mean for the landfills that are a lot more full than DADS? Something that bothers me is that if we are trying to become more “green” then why is it that if one thing is in the recycling bin that shouldn’t be then everything in there gets thrown out? With the landfill filling up like it is, it seems like we should be finding more ways to reuse our things in order to reduce the amount of waste. Waste Management is finding ways to help the environment by collecting the methane gas from the landfill and making it renewable energy that can support people. For the sake of the future, we need to find other ways to be eco-friendly and decrease the amount of waste we produce as a country. In Capra’s book, The Web of Life, he talked about how the world is interconnected with the people living on it. The problems that humans cause are affecting the environment, Capra wrote, “As the century draws to a close, environmental concerns have become of paramount importance. We are faced with a whole series of global problems that are harming the biosphere and human life in alarming ways that may soon become irreversible” (3). The irreversible effects were evident when we visited the landfill. The multiple “mountains” are permanent and are a result of an overpopulated world that is creating more trash than we know what to do with.