Time’s a-wasting

There are some difficult issues to sort out with regard to the Sullivan County Landfill, but one point stands out as absolutely clear: shipping our waste out of here is at best a temporary finger in the dyke.

So far, most of the planet has solved its mushrooming garbage problem by shipping it, or flushing it, or throwing it “somewhere else.” But we are running out of somewhere elses. From overflowing and rancid landfills to the gigantic gyres of plastic waste—the biggest of which is the size of Africa—that currently swirl in our oceans, our waste graveyards are rapidly becoming saturated. And every such graveyard will soon run up against a limit: either the people living next to it will say “no more,” like the neighbors of the Monticello landfill, or the poisons they emit will so severely compromise crucial environmental resources that they will start killing us off as well as lower species. The effects of our effluvia on animal populations have already been severe (see pages 1 and 4 for some cases in point). We are higher up on the food chain, but that only means it will take longer for us to be affected, not that we are immune.

A decision to ship trash out of county for the indefinite future would simply leave us with the illusion that we have solved the problem. We won’t have. It will just come back to haunt us in 20 years or so, by which time it will have grown bigger and worse. We need instead to get serious right now about coming up with a plan to produce zero net waste.

Such a plan could combine policies that restrict the potential trash that comes into the county—like a ban on plastic shopping bags—with robust recycling policies and plans to convert what can’t be recycled as materials into energy. The methane-powered electrical plant already proposed for the landfill would be consistent with such an aim. There are a number of communities that have already adopted zero-net-waste policies, including New York City, Berkeley and Seattle. Though these big cities face a somewhat different set of problems, it might be possible to look at what they have been doing and get some ideas from them.

We realize that even if such a strategy were adopted, the county would need a short-term solution while the necessary infrastructure was put in place. Some ideas could be implemented immediately, like the abovementioned ban on plastic shopping bags, or encouraging local supermarkets to stop packaging produce in plastic and Styrofoam. But most measures will take longer to implement.

We are not going to win any popularity contests for saying so, but an increase in tipping fees would probably be in order to motivate residents to reduce their own waste generation and participate aggressively in recycling. It might not be fair to do so until we have more robust recycling capability in place, including more access to transfer stations where recycled materials can be unloaded, but individuals need to start recognizing their own responsibility with regard to the waste problem and come up with ways to participate in recycling. One idea would be to establish “garbage pools” in which neighbors alternate weeks in taking recyclables to the transfer stations, reducing the time and gas burden on each individual household.

While all these ducks are being lined up, the garbage still has to go somewhere. One option is to ship it out of county until an adequate zero-waste infrastructure has been built here. That might not be such a bad idea, except that, by removing the urgency of finding a solution, it could make us forget about the whole thing until it comes back to bite us. The other option is to expand the landfill, but with a clear deadline as to when we will have our zero-waste plans in place. This would be better from a motivational view, but there is a tangle of legal obstacles that makes it unclear whether we will be able to pursue this route.

But whatever we do with the landfill short term, it’s time to come up with a zero net waste plan for the long term, for our own sake and that of the human race. Not only the protests of Monticello residents, but accelerating toxification of the ecosystems that support us, tell us that we are running out of time perilously fast.

Dr. Punnybone

Over Drawn