Response #4

Harmful emissions and waste plague our world especially here in New York City.  Each year a huge amount of waste is produced by every person in the world, and with a population of over 20 million, those in New York City have faced an issue of overflowing waste since the Dutch came in the 17^th century.  With so many people producing so much waste each year, the question begs, what to do with all of it?  At first, landfills seemed to be a hugely effective means of recycling waste, Battery Park being accredited to large amounts of landfilling throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  As discussed in class, as waste levels increased, incinerators became the common means of destroying waste.  In theory I agree with this plan, without the need for more landfills, burning huge piles of garbage seems like the best way to reduce space taken up by filth.  As eleven municipal refuse incinerators were built by the end of the 60’s, and 700 cities using those municipal incinerators by the late 1930’s, it seems as if the general belief was similar to mine own back then.  Matter cannot be destroyed, but rather only altered, so the incinerators only change the form of garbage, in essence making garbage easier to breathe, in everyday life.  This is the flaw in the practice with these eleven municipal incinerators up until they were all removed in the 90’s.  My parent’s apartment building shows its age with the incinerator still present, yet inactive.  Unlike the general consensus I felt last class, I do not believe that incinerators should not be used.  It is very possible I am just ignorant to all of the facts, but my goal is to change this so please correct me if I am wrong.  All the harmful emissions out of incinerators were unknown to the populations of the day when the incinerators were being constructed.  Today we have a much larger wealth of information on the subject, and as I am to understand, filters placed in the stacks would eliminate the particulate matter that gets blown to Ohio when we burn our garbage here in New York.  I understand that the garbage itself can never be destroyed, but is rather converted into smoke and trapped in the filters, so the filters still remain with all of the harmful PMs, so there is still a physical remainder of the garbage.  Is that garbage not made significantly more manageable?  My question is why there is an uproar over incinerators if they have the potential to largely shrink the amount of physical garbage in the city?  With tens of thousands of waste produced by Americans each year, would it not make sense to reduce the 26, 800, 000 tons of food for instance, into a stack of filters much smaller in size and mass?  While investigating this idea, the numbers shock me, and what worries me most is the plastics portion of the graph displayed in class.  Plastics are one of the few numbers that showed a sharp increase, with potential to continue at the same rate.  In addition to the more recent prevalence of plastics, plastics themselves are extremely complicated chemically, and I wonder how one would break down five million tons for instance of glass and plastic bottles each year.  The danger with burning plastic is also worrisome, but should there not be a filter for that?  The past week in class has already changed my outlook on the way I live, and I can already sense a change in the ways I recycle and what I use that must be disposed of.  This week I feel a little less ignorant than I did the week before.