Ben Flikshteyn, MHC 200, Professor Alexandratos, 9.29.12, Weekly Response 4
It seems as if out of sight and out of mind is a common attitude when it comes to waste disposal. We have seen dredged soil from the Hudson buried in Texas. We have seen incinerators that put garbage into the air versus leaving it visible. Even landfills are not without problems. It is impossible to predict if they will leak, or hold. For example, an earthquake near San Francisco easily toppled the buildings on landfills. However, because these waste products are hidden from our sight we do not feel pressure to deal with them. Unfortunately, there is a limit to how much we can hide and bury and launching things into space is not yet viable. Fortunately, by analyzing what we throw away we can avert, or at least delay, the problems with our waste management strategies.
My favorite part of class this week was tracing the technological advances New York has made, by digging through its trash. Across the years 1905, 1939, 1971, and 1989 much has changed and much has stayed the same in the city’s trash. Food has made up a steady percentage of waste but ash has fallen form a colossal 80% to almost nothing. Conversely, paper, plastic, and metal compose growing amounts. The most staggering shift, however, is the appearance of a miscellaneous category in 1989 that takes up almost 15% of trash found in landfills. Disposable diapers, a luxury item, make up a tremendous amount of waste that must be dealt with. They are hardly the most necessary or most useful things we throw away and yet they are discarded en masse.
It so baffled me that we could allow so much waste to be generated for a product that used to be made of reusable cloth that I began trying to invent an alternative. I was toying with designs that have a layered diaper so that most of it can be reused, only disposing of the dirtied portion. I watch a show called “Shark Tank” in which inventors try to sell their business ideas to a group of “sharks”, or investors. This week, the episode featured a brand called FuzziBunz. A woman cited the same facts about the miscellaneous category that we learned in class and had the same reaction that I did. She invented a diaper that is extremely easy to wash (parents do not have to touch the soiled portion at all) and has priced it so that it actually saves parents an average of 2,500 dollars in diaper costs. Her product, along with imitations from competitors, has sold $40,000,000 in the last twelve years and is catching on.
This is an example where humans are overcoming the tendency to ignore what they bury. Diapers may be a dirty little secret, hidden under the title miscellaneous, but by studying what goes in to landfills solutions are uncovered.
This type of problem solving can be applied to many of the other things we throw away as well. Glass and plastic have become more mainstream materials, adding to the chemical complexity of landfills. It would be excellent to remove these from the equation. The five-cent deposit on plastic bottles is a good idea but it is out of date. Five cents was worth a larger percent of the total price of the drink when the return policy was implemented. If it were to be adjusted for inflation, many more people would save their bottles. Although it may seem to raise the price of drinks, causing concern among beverage companies, if the deposit were larger people would be sure to return the bottles and, knowing this, be unbothered by the extra cost as it is only temporary.
On an unrelated note I am thinking about starting to wear a mask on the subway or at least shelling out $200 dollars to get my bike fixed. Between the steel in the air and what I’ve heard about the tuberculosis outbreak, the subway is becoming a scary place.
