In the constant effort to control the
dissolving ozone layer, governments around the world are
wrestling with waste management. Simply put, we’ve been
trying to figure out what to do with the garbage left
over from our wasteful lives, and the destructive methane
gas, they produce. Rather than continuing the push to
reduce and reuse, corporate Earth has continued to push
its agenda, with winning results, and dumping has become
the easy fix to a most immeasurable problem.
THE HISTORY
Humans are, by their very nature, careless with trash.
It is not a trait of the 20th century. “Garbologists”
have discovered that people have always let trash fall
where it may. There has been a problem with trash from
man's earliest time and the four basic means of dealing
with it have been used over and over. 1. Dumping 2. Burning
3. Recycling 4.Waste minimization Up until very recently
in the western world, urbanites would dump piles of trash
into the streets. As a result, diseases like Typhoid and
Cholera ran rampant. The Great Plague was thought to have
fostered from rats living in and off of the city’s waste
and many of the great fires of history were encouraged
by piles of trash which were easily ignited. By 1900,
America began using giant barges to carry their trash
ten miles from shore, to then dump it in the ocean. But
that resulted in much of the floating trash ending up
on New Jersey's beaches, where many people came to bathe.
To this day, giant barges sit floating out at sea floating
garbage they can’t deposit of. In the last decades, “garbage
islands” have been traversing up and down the Atlantic
seaboard shipping garbage to un-wanting developing nations.
THE LANDFILL DILEMMA
Methane is one of the main components of landfill gas.
It’s an odorless, colorless gas generated by the anaerobic
decomposition of degradable organic waste. Food and yard
waste, construction materials and paper products are the
main culprits. Although its composition can vary, landfill
gas is typically half methane and half carbon dioxide,
with trace levels of sulphur compounds and volatile organic
compounds. Sites begin producing landfill gas in their
first year, and can continue producing for up to half
a century. Municipal dumps generate over a quarter of
the methane emissions caused by human activity in Canada.
They send 1.2 million tonnes of this potent greenhouse
gas into the atmosphere each year. Because the global
warming effect of methane is 21 times greater than that
of carbon dioxide, this is the equivalent of greenhouse
gas emissions from more than six million cars--or 40 per
cent of all the passenger vehicles in the country. With
abundant natural resources, considerable transportation
distances, and ample landfill space, Canada has been slow
to act on reducing waste. In fact, Canadians are the largest
per-capita generators of waste in the world, producing
about 20 percent more municipal waste than the OECD (Organization
for Economic Co-operation Development) average. Provinces
and municipalities have the most responsibility for waste
policy; the federal government is limited to national
coordination, such as controlling interprovincial and
international movements of hazardous waste, regulating
sea dumping, and managing waste at federal facilities
and on aboriginal lands. By all “standards”, Canadians
seem to recycle about 25% of their waste. The rest...
ship it somewhere else. TORONTO’S GARBAGE
Such is the dilemma facing major cities around the world.
Based on the lack of available or suitable land, cities
resort to shipping their garbage outside their community
as cheaply as possible. Since the days of the bible, administrators
have told citizens to take their garbage to the edge of
town. This also spurred a lucrative business in independent
waste management, essentially middlemen for garbage. A
rally designed to shame Toronto into finding another place
to store its garbage may be all that stands between Kirkland
Lake residents and 1.3 million tonnes yearly of megacity
trash. Eleven years after they first raised the possibility,
city staff are recommending most of Toronto's garbage
be shipped 600 kilometres north by train to the Adams
Mine landfill, where the municipality's solid waste will
be stored in an abandoned iron ore mine. According to
recommendations another half-million tonnes will be shipped
by rail each year to a giant landfill site in Michigan.
Kirkland Lake residents, along with neighbours in nearby
Larder Lake and Englehart, have fought tooth and nail
for the past decade against taking Toronto's trash. Although
the 20-year, billion-dollar contract with Rail Cycle North,
which would be the largest the city has ever signed, is
expected to bring money and jobs to the Northern Ontario
towns, residents say they'll be trading their health for
a paycheque. Unfortunately, the unlined mine is riddled
with cracks, and residents fear toxic leachate, the dirty
water that runs from landfill sites, will seep into the
groundwater and destroy their drinking water. The bid
by Rail Cycle North, which would deliver garbage to the
Kirkland Lake mine, was barely mentioned in city staff's
first recommendations. THE PROBLEM
What’s the problem with this picture? Well, all that money
spent dealing with garbage rather than finding ways not
to make it for one. The expensive consultancy fees to
tell us what we should already know. When environmentalist
lean on the government to control packaging standards,
big business screams unfair. Corporate interests apparently
can’t be served unless your gum comes with at least two
different levels of wrapper. It’s ultimately up to us,
the consumer. For some reason, being environmentally conscience
has fallen out of trend, but if we don’t get active again,
the world will continue to become a very smelly place. Mb
