What Fills The Landfill?

credit: morcomm@stock.xchangI grew up in a small town back in the time when we still called the local landfill the city dump. We kids knew the dump very well - one of our Saturday chores was to accompany my dad to the dump to help him unload the trash. It smelled to high heaven, but it was also a wonderland of discoveries. You never knew what you'd find at the dump back then - people just threw things out with no concern about biodegradation or decomposition and no worries about how many centuries that plastic cup would sit in the ground before returning to the Earth.

But it was the 1970s, the decade that gave us Earth Day and the Smiley Face. Biodegradeable became a catch word, and people started paying attention to the things that they threw out and the poisons that leached into the earth - and then into our ground water and our water tables. Aside from the toxic wastes, we learned about the things that would not biodegrade, that would live on in the landfills and eventually, if we kept throwing those things out, they would crowd us out of our own planet.

Two things took a high place in that list of horrible, awful things - styrofoam packaging and disposable diapers. They couldn't be recycled and they wouldn't biodegrade. If we didn't do something about them, we would soon be living on mountains of dirty plastic diapers and fast food styrene containers.

And then along came William Rathje. Rathje devised The Garbage Project and is the founder of Garbology - the science of analyzing garbage and learning what it says about people. Rathje's Garbage Project has had some interesting uses over the years, but one of the most interesting was his discovery of how fast things biodegrade - or don't - and what makes up the bulk of our landfills. Digging into dumps in Arizona and the Southwest, Rathje's team found newspapers from the 1970s that could still be read and steak bones with fat and meat still on them. Even worse, they found hot dogs that were pretty much untouched  think about that next time you bite into a ballpark treat.

They also learned that, surprisingly, disposable diapers and expanded foam containers - the kind your Big Mac used to come in - make up a whole lot less of landfill by volume than we'd estimated and assumed. In fact, if you take both together, they make up less than 2% of landfill space by volume OR weight.

So if we're not building up piles of foam packaging (styrofoam peanuts and stereo packagingin included) and dirty diapers, what ARE we filling our landfills with? Are you ready for the answer?

Paper. Especially newspaper. According to Rathje, if we were more diligent about recycling our newspapers and magazines, we could extend the usable life of our landfills by decades. Which is actually pretty darn funny when you think about it, since paper is the one household item that we've had the capacity to recycle the longest. What does it say about us that the items that take up the most space in our landfills are things that we have the easiest capacity to recycle? That they're things that shouldn't ever end up IN a landfill in the first place? Maybe the novelty has worn off?

These days, I live in a big city - one of the first city's in the country to institute regular curbside recycling. Every week, instead of traveling to the dump I put out laundry baskets of unsorted - because they make it so easy for us now - tin cans, glass and plastic bottles and other recycleable items. I almost never put out newspapers and magazines, and most of my paper trash... goes in the trash. All that junk mail and those grocery flyers - I'll be you file them in the round file, too, don't you?

Maybe the answer to reducing some of that paper trash - that doesn't biodegrade, remember? T- is to go back to the old days before recycling, or the early early days of recycling, and hold good old-fahsioned paper drives to heighten awareness of just how much paper we DON'T recycle. What do you think? Would you put all your paper trash in a paper bag and put it out for the Boy Scouts?