Sunday November 14, 2004
The only real solution to too much garbage
The Kelowna landfill site on Glenmore Road will probably open seven days a week starting next year.
The Glenmore site is currently closed on Sundays. So apparently many Kelowna residents drive across the Okanagan Lake Bridge on Sundays to use the Westside landfill. Which has, the newspaper report noted, a limited lifespan.
By implication, the Glenmore site doesn\’t.
And that is, of course, nonsense. Every landfill site has a limited lifespan.
New York\’s “Fresh Kills” site – a wonderfully descriptive title, don\’t you think? – covered some 3000 acres, more than 12 square kilometers. For 50 years, New Yorkers added their garbage, until parts of the pile reached the height of a 22-storey building.
When the site closed in 2001, New York had to start hauling 11,000 tons of garbage a day to New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia, as far as 500 kilometers away. That\’s a semi-trailer rig every 2.5 minutes – 550 a day, equivalent to a convoy nine miles long.
The Toronto experience
Toronto also thought it had a site with an unlimited lifespan. I remember driving along a bucolic country road, admiring the autumn leaves, and passing unexpectedly by Toronto\’s Keele Valley landfill – a grey mound, the highest point in an otherwise flat landscape.
Toronto closed Keele Valley two years ago. First it tried to truck its garbage to an abandoned mine in Kirkland Lake, in northern Ontario. When that plan fell through, Toronto arranged to ship its garbage, 907,000 tonnes a years, across the border into Michigan. It used to cost $12 a tonne to dump. It now costs $52 a tonne to truck it to Michigan.
The U.S. states used to welcome the income from fees. Virginia alone expects to receive $76 million a year from New York. But now they\’re saying they don\’t want to be a dumping ground for other cities\’ refuse.
So Toronto has gone on a recycling binge. Toronto originally just had blue boxes for recyclables. Then grey boxes. Then green boxes for organic wastes. Yard waste has to go into biodegradable paper bags.
Toronto citizens now sort everything before it goes out to the curb. Households have turned into private recycling depots. (Apartment complexes are another story – let\’s not go there.)
The recycling program is working. Toronto had hoped to divert 30 per cent of the garbage that used to go to landfill by the end of 2003. In fact, they hit 32 per cent.
The next stage is harder. They want to achieve 60 per cent diversion by 2006, and 100 per cent by 2010. (The original goal was 90 per cent, but idealistic city councillors upped the ante.)
The forgotten factor
When I was in Toronto in October, newspapers were full of articles praising or blasting Toronto\’s recycling program.
Some argued that Toronto had out-recycled any other North American city. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute questions those claims. He says that Los Angeles recycles 44 per cent of its garbage, Chicago 47 per cent, and Seattle and Minneapolis both close to 60 per cent – all higher than Toronto\’s 32 per cent.
Others argued that Toronto\’s goals were unrealistic and would only lead to disillusionment.
But I don\’t remember seeing, in all those articles, any reference to the only long-term solution for the amount of garbage produced.
Buy less.
It\’s that simple. Buy less.
Perhaps that\’s an unthinkable thought in our economy – especially just before Christmas, the biggest retail bonanza of the year.
Shopping, buying, consuming – these are the holy grail of North America, as untouchable as India\’s sacred cows. When president George Bush wanted to hearten his country after the September 11 attacks, he told them to get out and shop.
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Our whole economy is founded on the assumption of endless growth. We buy houses, expecting their value to rise. We invest in mutual funds and corporate shares, counting on continued growth. We build factories and big-box retail outlets to seduce even more people into becoming consumers.
Our towns and cities develop Official Community Plans for residents who haven\’t even thought of moving there yet.
As Lester Brown points out, we have become a throwaway society. We use facial tissues instead of handkerchiefs. We use disposable paper towels, disposable table napkins, and throwaway beverage containers.
“In perhaps the ultimate insult,” Brown adds, “the shopping bags that are used to carry home throwaway products are themselves designed to be discarded.”
Suggest that endless growth in consumption is not the answer, may never happen, perhaps should never happen, and our whole economic house of cards wobbles like a Lombardy poplar in a gale.
Without endless growth, most people will wail, there is nothing to look forward to. Investments will not automatically appreciate. Pension plans will suffer. Businesses will stagnate. Employment will go flat. We cannot expect to graduate to bigger houses, or move up to a Mercedes.
But buying less is, in fact, the only solution that will work. Just as the only absolutely guaranteed way to lose weight is to eat less. Obesity is not a problem in India or Ethiopia. Most of our diets are an attempt to cling to the best of both worlds – losing weight while still eating the foods we like best.
In the same way, most garbage reduction programs are attempts to make better use of the output while consuming as much as ever.
Computer programmers have an acronym – GIGO – that stands for “garbage in, garbage out.” As long as we continue to purchase more, we will inevitably have more to discard.
So what will force us to change? Most of us hug our preconceptions close to our hearts. They are our version of reality, an irresistible force that rides roughshod over alternate views. We change those preconceptions only when they encounter an immoveable object, a conflicting reality that we can no longer deny.
Maybe the garbage crisis is it.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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