44
and dumped into the landscape during the mining of raw materials, and the poisonous industrial sludge and ash created in turning raw materials into finished goods.
The total mass footprint of low or no value solid compounds extracted can be orders
of magnitude greater than the item created. The environmentalist and documentary
film maker, Chris Jordan, recently shared what he had learned on location in South
America that “the mining footprint of a single gold ring is 40,000 pounds of dust, a
pile of 40,000 pounds of toxic dust that is sitting on a hillside somewhere in Chile,
and it’s going to be leaching cadmium and mercury and arsenic into the soil for
thousands of years” (Jordan 2020).
Through formal and accidental solid waste management practices, we are changing the physical, chemical, and thermal profiles of ground we stand on. As the population grows, we will discard more and more. The lasting effects brought about by
our increasing piles of detritus will continue to mount. Environmental impacts reach
beyond local garbage dumps where, even under controlled conditions, seepage into
groundwater and off-gassing of harmful compounds continue.
The systems currently in place in the United States to contain and treat the nearly
270 million tons of municipal solid waste we produce are complicated and expensive. We know that without them, some of the garbage won’t just sit there. We line
the bottoms of our dumps with plastic liners in order to keep “garbage juice” from
seeping into groundwater supplies. We stick pipes into the layers of trash to capture
methane from escaping into the atmosphere where, ton for ton, it is 30 times more
potent than C0 2 as a heat trapping greenhouse gas. If this gas is not captured, treated,
and used as fuel, it would join the earth’s enormous natural stores of methane currently escaping from previously frozen tundra soils. As global temperatures rise,
these methane-rich ground sources, defrosting as fast as an unplugged freezer, will
release a growing amount into the atmosphere, thus contributing to a vicious cycle
of increasingly faster rising temperatures and even less permafrost to contain the
ancient anaerobic decomposition byproduct.
3.3 Air
A clear majority of scientists regularly and unequivocally tell us that climate change
is being driven by human activity. They identify increasing amounts of two primary
greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide and methane (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2018),
that have been steadily added to the air for 200 years. Carbon dioxide, or CO 2 , is
produced when living beings breathe out. It gets produced at a much greater rate
along with other long-lived greenhouse gasses when we burn things as we have for
millennia and at a much faster rate during the last three centuries.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Annual
Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) tracks the combined measurements of all long-lived
greenhouse gases. In addition to NOAA’s own global air sampling network in operation since 1979, they use measurements of CO 2 going back to the 1950s from
C.D. Keeling (1958), combined with atmospheric change evidence derived from air
3 Trash Can Living
and dumped into the landscape during the mining of raw materials, and the poisonous industrial sludge and ash created in turning raw materials into finished goods.
The total mass footprint of low or no value solid compounds extracted can be orders
of magnitude greater than the item created. The environmentalist and documentary
film maker, Chris Jordan, recently shared what he had learned on location in South
America that “the mining footprint of a single gold ring is 40,000 pounds of dust, a
pile of 40,000 pounds of toxic dust that is sitting on a hillside somewhere in Chile,
and it’s going to be leaching cadmium and mercury and arsenic into the soil for
thousands of years” (Jordan 2020).
Through formal and accidental solid waste management practices, we are changing the physical, chemical, and thermal profiles of ground we stand on. As the population grows, we will discard more and more. The lasting effects brought about by
our increasing piles of detritus will continue to mount. Environmental impacts reach
beyond local garbage dumps where, even under controlled conditions, seepage into
groundwater and off-gassing of harmful compounds continue.
The systems currently in place in the United States to contain and treat the nearly
270 million tons of municipal solid waste we produce are complicated and expensive. We know that without them, some of the garbage won’t just sit there. We line
the bottoms of our dumps with plastic liners in order to keep “garbage juice” from
seeping into groundwater supplies. We stick pipes into the layers of trash to capture
methane from escaping into the atmosphere where, ton for ton, it is 30 times more
potent than C0 2 as a heat trapping greenhouse gas. If this gas is not captured, treated,
and used as fuel, it would join the earth’s enormous natural stores of methane currently escaping from previously frozen tundra soils. As global temperatures rise,
these methane-rich ground sources, defrosting as fast as an unplugged freezer, will
release a growing amount into the atmosphere, thus contributing to a vicious cycle
of increasingly faster rising temperatures and even less permafrost to contain the
ancient anaerobic decomposition byproduct.
3.3 Air
A clear majority of scientists regularly and unequivocally tell us that climate change
is being driven by human activity. They identify increasing amounts of two primary
greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide and methane (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2018),
that have been steadily added to the air for 200 years. Carbon dioxide, or CO 2 , is
produced when living beings breathe out. It gets produced at a much greater rate
along with other long-lived greenhouse gasses when we burn things as we have for
millennia and at a much faster rate during the last three centuries.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Annual
Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) tracks the combined measurements of all long-lived
greenhouse gases. In addition to NOAA’s own global air sampling network in operation since 1979, they use measurements of CO 2 going back to the 1950s from
C.D. Keeling (1958), combined with atmospheric change evidence derived from air
3 Trash Can Living