Trash
America is a trashy country, the bane of my father who always regarded garbage as a sure sign of poverty. Ever since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1621, trash has been piling up over the country’s once pristine landmass; a consequence of living in a country with abundant resources and a profligate consumer culture. Growing up in Pittsburgh in the fifties and sixties, trash in the form of residential and industrial waste inundated my city, poisoned the water and air, sullied the streets and wooded areas, and in an antithetical way, became part of normality. In 1969, a visit to New York City reinforced that normality. Some months later, I visited Boston, clean by comparison, a relative normality. Two years later I had the privilege of visiting my first foreign city, Reykjavík, Iceland, a winter fairyland then only depicted in paintings and glossy tourist’s advertisements. That same year, 1971, I visited several cities in Europe. The Germans may generate as much trash, but they are better at hiding and disposing of it. Municipalities there have an ordinance enforced by The Department of Order (Ordnungsbehörde), the Good Neighbor Edict, Gutnachbarlich Edikt. If their dutiful inspectors discover trash on your front stoop or lawn, they issue a severe fine for both you and your immediate neighbors.
I wholly agree with the Germans; I am constantly picking up trash on my morning constitutional. My home state of Pennsylvania once had the opportunity to reduce street litter by imposing deposits on bottled and canned beverages, but our state’s beverage association bombarded the state representatives in Harrisburg with lobbyists who then convinced lawmakers to shelve it before it got to the governor’s desk. Consequently, discarded beverage containers still muddle our streets. They are not only unsightly, but pose real hazards for bicyclists, pedestrians, children, and wildlife. Although the German method: out of sight, out of mind, may work to keep the landscape unblemished, it does little to mollify Mother Nature. To this day, they are leaders in recycling their residential and industrial detritus.
I once had the unfortunate experience of working as a back-loader on a garbage truck, a temporary job in the middle of Boston’s worst winter in decades, mercifully lasting only one week. During that time, I imagined my fellow Americans as obscene trash generators, or anthropomorphically, rats in abandoned basements or broken sewer lines, or humorously, deranged squirrels collecting discarded, empty nut shells for the coming winter. The average rodent is tidier, mind you — those humble creatures often eat the packaging and leave only biodegradable waste behind — their own waste. The municipal landfills aren’t the end of the line for garbage; a large percentage of it returns in the form of toxic chemicals; lingers, seeps into the groundwater, and damages the health and quality of life for future generations. I blanched as I picked up dead dogs, cats, pet birds, whole libraries, bursting blood-bags, bottles of horrible smelling chemicals, glass and tin containers reeking of fowl and indefinable odors, human waste, offal and other slaughtered animal parts, reams of paper, automobile parts, toys, bicycles, tires, car batteries, etc., ad nauseum. Nothing shocked me, but the enormity of garbage diminished my opinion of our species, immeasurably. Residential homes and apartments, trailer parks, luxury hotels, schools, medical facilities, churches, convents, it made no difference, Americans of all classes developed a severe case of amnesia every time they placed their trash out onto the curb. Sometimes my imagination got ahead of me, especially when I picked up bags dripping with viscous fluids. Hacked human remains, I fancied, possibly a murder victim, a spiteful way to bury crazy Aunt Maggie, a rich woman who tormented the children in the neighborhood by sheltering a hundred or more cats, then bequeathing her fortune to a feline orphanage.
From my humble and unlearned perspective, environmentalists tend to compartmentalize waste disposal, each with a specialized jargon identifying the big culprits: the large industrial concerns, governmental organizations, military installations, electric utilities, and steel mills. Without exception, they shy away from the most enigmatic perpetrator, the American consumer, a word that euphemistically sanctifies a wasteful lifestyle under the aegis of economic growth. Take-away food and beverage containers, obsolete electronic gadgets, out-of-fashion clothing, and an addiction to the biggest evildoer of them all, the personal automobile, make everyone culpable in equal parts, and quite without being consciously aware or made to feel responsible, although most people are intelligent enough to understand the downstream consequences. The mathematics of garbage disposal proved daunting…demanding more than ten fingers and toes. In the end, it finally overwhelmed my ability to quantify my small world.
Trash is indeed democratic; every single American is complicit, an equal franchise owner in the landfill operation, a self-declared, near constitutional right to be an environmental exception. In a manner of speaking, abusing Mother Nature is an indulgence, confident, as we have convinced ourselves, that she will grant absolution for our despicable consumer habits. Indeed, though trash comes from every house, business, and governmental organization, it’s all linked to personal bad habits, a direct consequence of a deplorable, throwaway lifestyle. Millennia from today, archeologists or paleoanthropologists will judge us by our middens. What they will find will leave them aghast.
One of the most inimical habits Americans have acceded to is bottled-water, convinced, as advertising has convinced them, that it is purer, safer, and healthier than tap water — all untrue, even when compared to reverse osmosis (RO), natural spring, or distilled water. A certain amount of dirt, bacteria, even a little fluoride and chlorine may in fact be beneficial, or at the very least, counter harmful microorganisms persisting in our food. The down side: billions of plastic bottles floating around in the ocean, poisoning fish, disintegrating into microplastics, eventually recycling into our bodies in the form of bottled water.
Packaging is what the French might call our consumer-driven economy’s bête noir, the family ghost that continues to haunt us long after Aunt Mary’s self-indulgent purchases. Once upon a time most quality retailers proudly displayed their logos on their packaging. Brooks Brothers, Tiffany, and Ann Taylor shopping bags once had cache — rarely ending up on the curb on pickup day. Ditto for many thousands of domestically manufactured products. An American-made bicycle, typewriter, oven, or food container with a proud Made in America tag oftentimes ended up on collectors’ shelves, commanding more than their original purchase price. Items like Converse All-Star gym shoes became an abiding brand. Those products and their logos on their original packaging still command respect, have enduring commercial value, and in a mysterious way, exude a certain sentimental love. Intrinsic value, quality, and long-lasting utility are casualties of our disposable economy. I especially find it curious why some companies place their logos on disposable products. Food containers from corporate fast-food outlets are the worst offenders; they not only litter my street, but besmirch the company’s image.
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Among the more health-sensitive Americans, a new acronym is entering into the English lexicon: UPF, ultra-processed foods, a more precise and honest euphemism for junk food. UPF products command a hefty share of floor and shelf space in grocery stores, second only to the parking lot — all the center aisles — and it is causing obesity, heart ailments, diabetes, even neurological impairment in horrific numbers. Adding insult to injury, UPF products are mostly packaging, which, paradoxically, might have greater nutritional value. It also reverses a concept called value-added, a micro-economic term. For instance, a standing, healthy poplar tree has value to the earth as a carbon sink, watershed protector, wildlife habitat, and natural beauty enhancement. When foresters cut it down and convert it to pulp for cardboard packaging, that standing poplar tree ends up on the street for a poor back-loader to take to the landfill, or in the jargon of economists: value-subtracted.
Americans focus on the wrong side of environmental problems. Instead of petitioning our politicians to regulate what we so blithely consume, we’d do better by concentrating on the tertiary, the backside, the street litter, garbage in the landfill, and the resulting cultural degradation. Admittedly, this approach is dear to this obsessive, compulsive, parsimonious, environmentalist, a man who tends to focus on order, tidiness, aesthetics, and personal health. There is much written about the environmental consequences of plastics, chemicals, lead, asbestos, mercury, and other toxic materials ending up in landfills, but because they are out-of-sight, people tend to ignore the dire environmental consequences. The alternative is to change our approach to waste disposal, make it both an individual and householder responsibility, a tenant of citizenship. In the larger scheme of things, there is no such thing as garbage, which is a good starting point, and an excellent mantra.
Take for instance, lithium-ion (L-ion) batteries used in electric cars, cell phones and a thousand other devices. In addition to lithium, they contain magnesium, nickel, cobalt, and several rare earth elements. Though plentiful on this earth, they are costly to mine on ecologically fragile land, hazardous to process, and difficult (but feasible) to recycle. Moreover, the combination of these metals is not only toxic but unstable. Specialized recycle centers have sprung up, but there are few organized collection networks. They are not part of the product cycle.
Recycling plastics is difficult but possible if separated by polymer classifications. Ditto for most other materials, especially papers and metals. Recovering usable materials should be a higher priority. Expecting sanitation workers to sift through a hodgepodge of discarded material is a convenient way of ignoring the problem. The responsibility must come down to the household level, mandated by our own conscience, guided by our ideals, perhaps enforced by the government. I repeat, each family or individual must be accountable for their own waste. In our hearts we know it’s the only solution; we know every time we place a bag filled with trash to the curb, we are despoiling the planet, or what science fiction aficionados call spaceship earth.
Convincing people to live a more sustainable lifestyle is a tall order. Moving in that direction, incrementally, is hardly enough; we must do more, commit to loftier goals, minimally approaching net zero waste in our lifetime. America is in a good position to lead the way; we are the de facto trend-setters — what we do, good or bad, becomes the world standard. It’s sad that our most talented people engage in activities contrary to environmental good sense; to make money, garner power, or to flatter themselves with self-indulgent material possessions. Politicians ignore the issues. The Social Democrats are content with the consumer economy; they simply want a more equitable distribution; the Republicans want to eliminate our social safety net; the extreme right fantasizes about exhuming the fascists; futurists want to do battle with cyborgs; technocrats dream about terraforming Mars; business people simply want to make more money; I want a happy kingdom — a natural world without garbage. The country cannot rely on politicians or corporations; their visions are too myopic. The onus is on every one of us; government and corporate people, in time, will fall into place.
The Baby Boomers might be the last American generation brought up in a hierarchical religious order. Those that came after are reaching out for what their parents had forsaken, a defined connection to some form of spirituality. People often accuse environmentalists of worshipping Gaia, Mother Earth, which might not be far from the truth. There is a split between our ranks, however; those who believe Mother Earth is indeed a Goddess, thus claiming the earth is but a single living creature, a manifestation of which humans are an inseparable part, albeit deluded and gone astray. And then there are those who believe that God, the creator of all living beings, placed humans on this earth as guardians, but gone astray by a golden calf called consumerism. Count me as one the latter. I still have an enduring faith that Americans will realign with the natural ecology, first to assume responsibility over a divided country, then to assume America’s rightful leadership role.
If there is any hope for humanity it must come from the bottom up, a grass roots back to nature movement, a collective effort to transform a polluted, warring, divisive, trashy country into a happy kingdom. What Americans do; the world will surely follow.
Emil B. Lester, Jr.
Email: emorymacalister@gmail.com
