But, I watched this special on CNBC earlier (or part of it, anyway, it was what Josh was watching when I got home, and I got hooked on it: http://www.cnbc.com/id/38830389/)
Trash, Inc: The Secret Life of Garbage.
The images I came in on were of the illegal landfills (nearly 400 of them) that dot the suburban landscape surrounding Beijing. I guess that by 2014, Beijing's 10 municipal landfills, taking in millions of tons of garbage every year, will be full to capacity. Closed. And then? The government wasn't exactly portrayed as having plans to deal with the issue, except possibly to build incinerators. People living in between and around the landfills are worried about the hazards to their health--not only from the garbage they smell daily when the wind is right, but also from the proposed solution, the incinerators. Can you imagine that in less than 5 years one of the most populous cities in the world will be facing a solution-less trash problem??? And they're still growing, producing more and more waste. We already ship ours overseas, from state to state, making a business of it (check out Noxious New York by Julie Sze for more on that). Is this progress? All of us having stuff and nowhere to toss the waste?
The show went on to depict how BMW uses LNG (Landfill Natural Gas, or methane) to power some of its factories, saving them over $7 billion a year in energy costs, and turning waste into energy. Other clips showed fabrics being made from plastic bottles. Finally, there were clips of beaches in Hawaii, undeveloped beaches that ought to be "pristine wilderness" (go unpack that phrase) and yet are full of plastic debris. So much, in fact, that when it comes to the finer grains, it's hard even for the specialist on camera to differentiate between plastic and natural. Apparently, it's hard for the wildlife, too, says the specialist, holding up bits of plastic packaging with bites and pecks torn from them.
Hawaii gets its trash from the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" (yeah, that's its real name), one of five garbage patches that apparently exist to some degree in each of the natural swirling vortexes, or gyres, of our planet's oceans. Apparently, this isn't like, marine debris, either. It's regular old civilized trashy trash that makes it out to the oceans thanks to wind and waterways. 5 million tons of it. Sitting on the ocean floor. Waiting to be washed up on a pristine beach near you.
I won't say I can confirm all this information is accurate. I came in toward the tail end of the program and was distracted by the paper I'm about to go write. But I'm certainly reacting to the idea that we are literally gunking up our oceans, one plastic bottle at a time. And I'm reacting to the piles of trash shown in the middle of Beijing's streets. And to the memories I have of the smell of some of Bamako's alleys, filled with garbage. Garbage with no place to go.
Friedman says that all our biggest problems are energy problems. If incinerating Beiging's trash to create energy is a viable solution, this falls right in line with that. And it'll make it even more tragic if we don't do it, because if we had we'd've handled two problems at once, using them to solve each other.
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