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Throwing Out the Throwaway Economy

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The stresses in our early twenty-first century civilization take many forms—social, economic, environmental, and political. One distinctly unhealthy and visible illustration of all four is the swelling flow of garbage associated with a throwaway economy. As noted in my book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, throwaway products were first conceived following World War II as a convenience and as a way of creating jobs and sustaining economic growth. The more goods produced and discarded, the reasoning went, the more jobs there would be.

What sold throwaways was their convenience. For example, rather than washing cloth towels or napkins, consumers welcomed disposable paper versions. Thus we have substituted facial tissues for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for hand towels, disposable table napkins for cloth ones, and throwaway beverage containers for refillable ones. Even the shopping bags we use to carry home throwaway products become part of the garbage flow.

The throwaway economy is on a collision course with the earth’s geological limits. Aside from running out of landfills near cities, the world is also fast running out of the cheap oil that is used to manufacture and transport throwaway products. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is not enough readily accessible lead, tin, copper, iron ore, or bauxite to sustain the throwaway economy beyond another generation or two. Assuming an annual 2-percent growth in extraction, U.S. Geological Survey data on economically recoverable reserves show the world has 17 years of reserves remaining for lead, 19 years for tin, 25 years for copper, 54 years for iron ore, and 68 years for bauxite.

The cost of hauling garbage from cities is rising as nearby landfills fill up and the price of oil climbs. One of the first major cities to exhaust its locally available landfills was New York. When the Fresh Kills landfill, the local destination for New York’s garbage, was permanently closed in March 2001, the city found itself hauling garbage to landfill sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia—with some of the sites being 300 miles away.

Given the 12,000 tons of garbage produced each day in New York and assuming a load of 20 tons of garbage for each of the tractor-trailers used for the long-distance hauling, some 600 rigs are needed to move garbage from New York City daily. These tractor-trailers form a convoy nearly nine miles long—impeding traffic, polluting the air, and raising carbon emissions.

Fiscally strapped local communities in other states are willing to take New York’s garbage—if they are paid enough. Some see it as an economic bonanza. State governments, however, are saddled with increased road maintenance costs, traffic congestion, increased air pollution, potential water pollution from landfill leakage, and complaints from nearby communities.

In 2001 Virginia’s Governor Jim Gilmore wrote to Mayor Rudy Giuliani to complain about the use of Virginia for New York City’s trash. “I understand the problem New York faces,” he noted, “but the home state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York’s dumping ground.”

Garbage travails are not limited to New York City. Toronto, Canada’s largest city, closed its last remaining landfill on December 31, 2002, and now ships all its 750-thousand-ton-per-year garbage to Wayne County, Michigan.

In Athens, the capital of ancient and modern Greece, the one landfill available reached saturation at the end of 2006. With local governments in Greece unwilling to accept Athens’s garbage, the city’s daily output of 6,000 tons began accumulating on the streets, creating a garbage crisis. The country is finally beginning to pay attention to what European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas, himself a Greek, calls the waste hierarchy, where priority is given first to the prevention of waste and then to its reuse, recycling, and recovery.

3 comments
  1. Michelle

    I am currently reading Lester Brown’s book “Eco-Economy” which I am realizing I should have read years ago. Nevertheless, this book is a true eye-opener, and I can’t put it down. I am engaged by every page and I can’t wait to read his next book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

  2. Bobby B.

    “Overpopulation will kill us all!” used to be the mantra of the environmental movement. This post simply restates that position to say, “Overconsumption by populations that emulate the evil western economies will kill us all!” However, even though the greens have no new plays in their great big statist playbook, there is some truth in both versions of this all too often repeated declaration.

    In the animal kingdom, when herds move to an area that lacks predators and the herd’s numbers increase to a point that it consumes more resources than the land can produce, famine, disease and pestilence eventually rebalance the equation. If the green alarmists are correct about the ever-looming global apocalypse, then there really is not very much that can be done. If we continue down our current path, nature (famine, disease, pestilence, etc.) will reduce our numbers naturally. If we listen to the greens and make sweeping reforms to the developed and the developing nations of the world, the suffering and deaths will still occur because the only answers that they have involve abandoning the mechanisms that western man has developed to improve mankind’s lot on this planet. Their path includes eliminating plenty in favor of sustenance living; increasing the number of abortions; providing end of life counseling instead of health care for the elderly; taxing carbon to stifle industrial growth and better pay for employees (i.e. bankrupting the middle class); converting food into fuel; auditing our homes for energy efficiency and putting us on the street if the structure is deemed to be below code; eliminating pesticides and herbicides that protect us from disease and make adequate food production possible; and instituting a host of other programs that if successful at staving off the inevitable makes living miserable. In truth, their plans seek less to fix the planet than to impoverish all of mankind; and to subjugate all to some green ruling body, or global emperor, or god.

    So, basically, mankind – assuming the greens are right about the apocalypse – has two choices:

    1. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.

    or

    2. Starve, thirst and be destitute for the day after tomorrow we die.

    Either way, the end – or the beginning – will come. Maybe it’s time to listen to “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.”

  3. Tara

    The interesting thing about our throw-away society is that now we try to justify our obscene amount of waste with the recycling factor. It is seen as acceptable that we continue to purchase and buy disposable products because we will recycle the waste. Even so the energy and resources used to recycle plastics is still damaging to the environment. Even though we know the damage disposable products have on the environment and that resources are depleting at an unsustainable rate; recycling will magically fix all of those problems. But we all know it won’t. Americans are just not willing to sacrifice their convenience. If attitudes don’t change than we will be forced to change our lifestyles because of the detrimental, irreversible damage we have caused

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