Slaying the trash monster

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, quests, trash, garbage, environmentalism, recycling, plastics

In 2017 and 2019 there were controversial proposals in northern Delaware to raise the permitted height of the Cherry Island Landfill in Wilmington from about 150 feet to 190 and then 225 feet. This all dropped out of the news after a while. A recent search reveals that the present permitted height is 225 feet and the operator is seeking a variance to allow a new permitted height of 325 feet. At the same time, new compaction technology is being studied, that involved dropping weights of between six and thirty tons as much as 75 feet onto existing trash piles to increase their density and reduce the height of current landfills.

With this all sitting in the back of my mind, I ran across a book published last year, Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman's Trashy Journey to Zero Waste, by Eve O. Schaub. In prior years Mrs. Schaub has performed year-long experiments, with her family's often reluctant approval, that resulted in Year of No Sugar and Year of No Clutter. She has promised her family that this is the last such experiment! Having taken on the Trash Monster, and finding it rather harder to slay than the prior ones, she will need to set her sights on less onerous quests in the future.

At the beginning of the experiment, she reports that her family—she and her husband and two girls, teen and post-teen—had been filling a 96-gallon trash container every week. If "filling" is literally true, that comes to 4,992 gallons. At 7.48 gallons per cubic foot, it is 667 cubic feet, which is just over 8x8x10 feet, or one-twelfth of the volume of a 1,000 square-foot ranch house. Her family also has a 96-gallon recycling container, but I didn't get a good handle on how frequently it fills. Suffice it to say that total waste had been well beyond 5,000 gallons yearly, probably in the 1,000-cubic-foot range. How hard is it to reduce the landfilled portion to zero, and also getting recycling "right"? That is, it's good to recycle if the people taking away our "recycling" actually recycle it. (Spoiler: they mostly don't.)

Let me contrast that with my family, which until fifteen years ago included my wife and me and our college-age son. Now it is just the two of us. We have a few waste baskets around the house and a box for recyclables, which mostly holds cardboard, paper, and occasional steel or aluminum cans. If we were to hold our trash container until we filled it, we would be putting it out about every six weeks. We fill a plastic grocery bag or two weekly, which sit forlornly in the bottom of the bin on trash pickup day. The trash collectors typically reach in and snag out the bags rather than roll the whole bin over to upend into their truck. When our son was at home, we sometimes filled a third bag. By the way, we mostly kept all those single-use grocery bags, folded and stuffed into a bag. We reuse them for garbage. Now that we can't obtain them any more, our supply is slowly depleting. It will last another few years. As for the recycling bin, we put it out every second week, typically less than half full.

I suspect that the author's family and my family are close to the opposite ends of a spectrum of trash disposal for middle-class families in America. Back to the Wilmington landfill. It is notable in the area because the operator accepts trash from outside Delaware. Geographically and demographically, Wilmington is a suburb or Philadelphia. I suspect overflowing landfills in Philly provide a significant portion of the total trash.

This is the most recent Google Earth satellite photo of Cherry Island. By noodling around with my mouse, I find that the maximum height of the main dumping area, at lower right, is 150 feet. The similarly-sized area to its left has a height of 40-50 feet, as does the smaller area to the upper right. I don't know the filling strategy.

Wilmington is a smallish city, with about 80,000 residents, and the rest of the northeastern quarter of New Castle County has about twice that population. I don't know if Newark, Delaware, home of University of Delaware, uses the same landfill. If so, that portion of the county has a similar total population, making population of the "upper half" of the county about 400,00, all using that landfill. There is an area "south of the canal" focused on Middletown, that pushes total county population to almost 600,000, or more than half the state total. This historical montage of the Cherry Island area is instructive:

The years are 2010, 2005, and 1992 (it is what is available). Thirty years ago, only the whitish triangle in the middle of the photo was being actively landfilled. The county had planned for the future, and over time, we see how the future has arrived. Today's future includes possible growth of the main landfill to 325 feet, nearly the height of Iron Hill, at 328 feet the second-highest point in Delaware! The highest point in the state is a survey marker near Ebright Road as it passes north into Pennsylvania, 448 ft.

What has the author and her family discovered? It appears that to really not send anything to the landfill, in the face of limited recycling options, one must become a hoarder! So much for the Year of No Clutter!! I think it is the ancillary matters related to recycling that form the findings of greatest value. First and foremost: Plastic just isn't recyclable. Polyethylene (PE) can be "downcycled", that is, turned into products of lower value than their original use, such as making picnic benches out of recycled milk cartons. That takes care of "triangle" numbers #2 and #4, for high-density PE and low-density PE. All the other numbers can't be recycled, no matter what various industry websites say.

Can they be burned? Sort of. At present, waste incineration is sometimes used to generate heat to drive turbines and make electricity. However, burning plastics generates lots of toxic chemicals, and the worst of these come in two groups, the furans and the dioxins. In order:

Until petroleum-based polymers came along, the primary source of furans in the atmosphere was forest fires. They are produced by pyrolysis of cellulose, fortunately in rather low amounts. Typical methods of plastic incineration have a very high yield of furans, and they are trouble! Asthma- and cancer-causing trouble. Where is the research in how to incinerate plastic in a way that reduces furan production?

Dioxins contain chlorine, and are worse than furans. Forest fires also produce dioxins, but in very low amounts, due to the small amounts of chlorine in wood. PVC and PCB and other chlorine-containing plastics produce huge amounts of dioxins when burned. There should probably be a ban on burning them, but then what would we do with the waste? At present these are usually sent to landfills.

Looking back to a motto of Earth Day: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The first word is Reduce. Don't buy so many plastics in the first place, particularly the chlorine-containing ones. When "organic" produce or meat is wrapped in plastic, much of its "benefit" is nullified. Public safety is touted as the reason for wrapping (and over-wrapping and even triple-wrapping) food in plastic. A century ago that wasn't an option. The options were oilcloth for certain products, and cloth or paper for the rest. People learned how to use these to safely transport stuff, or they got food poisoning as a learning experience.

For some waste materials, reusing and recycling are possible. But for plastics in particular, these are hard to impossible. Mrs. Schaub advocates legislation coupled with education to make a difference. Both are hard. But so is encroaching illness and early death.

She is a born optimist. Still, as fascinating and well written as the book is, it's a bit of a downer. I'm glad to already be at the more frugal end of the spectrum. But there are still habits it would be worthwhile for me to change. I hope you'll read this book, and perhaps learn some useful strategies and habits.

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I want to correct a single erratum. On the first page we find a list of "Ten Statistics to be Horrified By". Number 6 states:

In its history, eight billion metric tons of plastic have been produced. That's the mass equivalent of 100 Moons.

Gigantic oops! The Moon's mass is 1/81st the mass of the Earth. That means that plastics already outweigh the entire Earth by 23%. Hardly! Eight billion is an 8 followed by nine zeroes. The statement implies that the Moon's mass is 80 million metric tons. The Moon, in short tons, weighs close to 8 followed by 19 zeroes. That's 80 billion billion short tons, or 72 billion billion metric tons. A better comparison would have been that 8 billion metric tons is about equal to 80,000 fully-laden aircraft carriers of the Gerald R. Ford class.