Landfills I guess? If the idea of just… disposing of something was never normalized, we might be more conscientious about what we make and what becomes of it when we don’t need it any more.
I think it’s quite a bit more complicated than this. The concept of disposing of something always existed, but for most of human history that meant just leaving waste where it fell or at most tossing it at the edge of the village.
It’s only once larger settlements appeared that a need to concentrate waste in one location to avoid despoiling the entire area became necessary. This was greatly compounded with the invention of manufactured materials that don’t biodegrade like glass and plastic. There was no other solution to this than to concentrate and bury waste so it didn’t end up everywhere.
That’s what I’m getting at. Biodegradable refuse is one thing, maybe once civilization grows you can’t just toss your apple core wherever. Central composting is fine.
But it’s exactly once non-biodegradable trash enters the picture that the problem arises. If, the first time someone just tossed out some artificial thing, people said “What are you doing? That’s gonna stay there”, maybe we would have taken more care in the things we produce and given more consideration to their lifespan.
I really really want to agree, but this feels like a battle against entropy. That’s not a battle you’re going to win unfortunately. Maybe just the attempt is worthwhile? Maybe that’s what humans do, try to impose a sense of control in a universe that’s slowly but inevitably working against that. At least it’s fun to try I guess.
Landfills actually seem to be endorsed by civil engineers to some degree (while also acknowledging that genuine Reuse, Recycle, or Combustion of products would be better)
GRADY (Practical Engineering) has videos on this. Here is one
I can’t really remember what i learned from this video though - it might be entirely about the effort it takes to protect the surrounding soil from leeching (chemicals and plastic want to go into the soil and mess it up!). So the sole engineering benefit of landfill might be that it literally fills in places where soil was “mined” to be used as gardening and construction materials.
I’ve seen that one. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the engineering that goes into a modern landfill. If you’re going to accumulate a bunch of refuse, a landfill is the way you deal with it.
I just wish we never decided it was okay to just throw away the things we make. I nearly said “garbage”, but that didn’t really feel like an invention. Imagine if the idea of just “disposing” of something was as bizarre to everyone else as it is to an environmentalist. If you make something that doesn’t bio-degrade, you have to figure out something to do with it when you’re done because there’s no such thing as “trash”.
Around the US, you can still find lots of buildings that have a disused trash incinerator in the basement or out in a back alley. At one time it was common, basically everywhere, to burn solid waste on site.
I think eliminating that practice was both good and bad. Good because burning waste in what basically amounts to a burn barrel with a smoke stack is nasty and produces tons of pollution which has lots of negative health related side effects, among other things.
Bad because it masked, maybe even helped exacerbate, the problem of generating and dealing with increasing amounts of trash. Now, instead of having to choke on billowing clouds of black smoke, you just throw your garbage in a dumpster where it gets hauled away out of sight and dumped in someone else’s back yard. That has consequences too. There are mismanaged landfills all over the place that cause lots of problems. But for most people, they’re out of sight and therefore out of mind.
And burying trash in the ground is cheap. So much useable stuff gets thrown away because it’s much cheaper, in the short term, to just throw it away.
It’s shameful. But I don’t know what else to expect from a society that primarily runs on greed.
Landfills I guess? If the idea of just… disposing of something was never normalized, we might be more conscientious about what we make and what becomes of it when we don’t need it any more.
I think it’s quite a bit more complicated than this. The concept of disposing of something always existed, but for most of human history that meant just leaving waste where it fell or at most tossing it at the edge of the village.
It’s only once larger settlements appeared that a need to concentrate waste in one location to avoid despoiling the entire area became necessary. This was greatly compounded with the invention of manufactured materials that don’t biodegrade like glass and plastic. There was no other solution to this than to concentrate and bury waste so it didn’t end up everywhere.
That’s what I’m getting at. Biodegradable refuse is one thing, maybe once civilization grows you can’t just toss your apple core wherever. Central composting is fine.
But it’s exactly once non-biodegradable trash enters the picture that the problem arises. If, the first time someone just tossed out some artificial thing, people said “What are you doing? That’s gonna stay there”, maybe we would have taken more care in the things we produce and given more consideration to their lifespan.
I really really want to agree, but this feels like a battle against entropy. That’s not a battle you’re going to win unfortunately. Maybe just the attempt is worthwhile? Maybe that’s what humans do, try to impose a sense of control in a universe that’s slowly but inevitably working against that. At least it’s fun to try I guess.
Landfills actually seem to be endorsed by civil engineers to some degree (while also acknowledging that genuine Reuse, Recycle, or Combustion of products would be better)
GRADY (Practical Engineering) has videos on this. Here is one
I can’t really remember what i learned from this video though - it might be entirely about the effort it takes to protect the surrounding soil from leeching (chemicals and plastic want to go into the soil and mess it up!). So the sole engineering benefit of landfill might be that it literally fills in places where soil was “mined” to be used as gardening and construction materials.
I’ve seen that one. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the engineering that goes into a modern landfill. If you’re going to accumulate a bunch of refuse, a landfill is the way you deal with it.
I just wish we never decided it was okay to just throw away the things we make. I nearly said “garbage”, but that didn’t really feel like an invention. Imagine if the idea of just “disposing” of something was as bizarre to everyone else as it is to an environmentalist. If you make something that doesn’t bio-degrade, you have to figure out something to do with it when you’re done because there’s no such thing as “trash”.
Around the US, you can still find lots of buildings that have a disused trash incinerator in the basement or out in a back alley. At one time it was common, basically everywhere, to burn solid waste on site.
I think eliminating that practice was both good and bad. Good because burning waste in what basically amounts to a burn barrel with a smoke stack is nasty and produces tons of pollution which has lots of negative health related side effects, among other things.
Bad because it masked, maybe even helped exacerbate, the problem of generating and dealing with increasing amounts of trash. Now, instead of having to choke on billowing clouds of black smoke, you just throw your garbage in a dumpster where it gets hauled away out of sight and dumped in someone else’s back yard. That has consequences too. There are mismanaged landfills all over the place that cause lots of problems. But for most people, they’re out of sight and therefore out of mind.
And burying trash in the ground is cheap. So much useable stuff gets thrown away because it’s much cheaper, in the short term, to just throw it away.
It’s shameful. But I don’t know what else to expect from a society that primarily runs on greed.