Trash (noun): “discarded matter; refuse.” Synonyms: waste, waste material, refuse, litter, garbage, debris, junk, dross, detritus, sweepings, dregs, remains, rubbish.
The biggest environmental cover-up operation in America has to do with where we send or dump our trash on land and at sea.
Throughout the country, subterranean garbage heaps (aka landfills) are rising, fueled by the 292.4 million tons of annual municipal solid waste (MSW). According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 2018, half of that trash went into landfills around the country. Worse, yearly MSW production has been steadily climbing, year after year since monitoring first began in the 1960s. The U.S. has never had a national recycling rate (recovered material plus composting) higher than 35% of all its waste.
That includes 22 billion plastic bottles every year. Enough office paper to construct a 12-foot-high wall from Los Angeles to Manhattan. It’s 300 times around the equator in paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons. It’s 500 disposable cups per average American worker — cups that will still be sitting in the landfill five centuries from now.
Of more than 5.5 million tons of refuse that Massachusetts produced in 2019, the state “exported” 2.2 million tons of trash to New Hampshire. That’s 55% more than in 2010, according to available data. Between 2015 and 2019, New Hampshire received an average of 2.2 million tons of “our” trash a year.
Without significant changes, those trash exports are projected to rise sharply. All but one of the commonwealth’s seven landfills are projected to close by 2030 while total landfill capacity in Massachusetts is expected to decline to just 60,000 tons, 90% below current levels. As a consequence, the state’s exports of trash are projected to increase to almost 2.3 million tons by 2030.
When I lived in New York City’s SoHo district in the 70s, my young son and I would take the ferry from lower Manhattan over to Staten Island to bike around the island. That was preferable to biking on the decommissioned parts of the old West Side Highway. On one trip, we encountered an entrance to the Fresh Kills Landfill (known as the Staten Island Landfill). The landfill covered 2,200 acres located along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary on the western side of the island. Dozens of garbage trucks and front loaders crawled over this mountain of trash with thousands of seagulls above them like alien predators searching for scraps of food.
I don’t have the space to describe the similar impacts of the 3,091 active landfills in the U.S. in 2020 and the over 10,000 old municipal landfills monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Then there is ocean trash, one of the world’s biggest pollution problems. The numbers are staggering: there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean. Of that mass, 269,000 tons float on the surface, while some four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea. But that’s not all.
This is not the only source of ocean pollution. New York City once used to transport and dump its municipal sludge (treated material from the city’s 14 water treatment plants) into the Atlantic Ocean. This was stopped in June 1992, marking the cessation of this method of waste management by all cities in America.
I have only touched the surface (no pun intended) of everything that is being dumped into our oceans. The unmentioned “trash” includes everything from downed military aircraft and ships from many wars to the dropping of 2,580 out-of-service subway cars by the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) into the Atlantic Ocean from 2001 to 2010 to create artificial reefs.
My research for this article led me to Hope Jahren’s book “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here.” She investigates the connection between our climate crisis and our global population’s insatiable desire to consume. Published in 2020, “The Story of More” is part scientific study and part memoir. In it, Jahren examines the 50-year timeline between her birth in 1969 and the present day. She states that our current population consumes far more resources than our ancestors ever did and that these skyrocketing rates of consumption have led to global environmental destruction and climatological change.
I ask you — do you believe enough Americans would dial back the comfortable, convenient, consumer intensive lifestyles fueled by our dependence upon fossil fuels to reverse our catastrophic climate crisis?
“Connecting the Dots” is published every other Saturday in the Recorder. John Bos is a contributing writer for Green Energy Times. His essays about the climate crisis have been published in the Springfield Republican, Worcester Telegram, Brattleboro Reformer and on Citizen Truth. Questions and comments are invited at john01370@gmail.com.