Bismillah Assalamu Alaikum
Garbage. On average, each of us deposits over four pounds of garbage
every day in waste baskets around the house. That’s about 30 pounds of
garbage per person, per week. If we didn’t take the trash out, it would
soon fill up our houses and apartments. If garbage trucks didn’t haul it
away, it would soon fill up our yards, neighborhoods, cities. The
average infant soils 8,000 to 10,000 diapers before being potty trained.
On a national basis, that’s 570 diapers per second, 49 million diapers a
day, nearly 18 billion diapers thrown in the trash a year. We toss in
another 27 million tons of food waste, 7 million tons of clothing and
footwear, 9 million tons of furniture and furnishings. At work, we
produce a lot more garbage. It adds up. America has to find somewhere to
stash over 400 million tons of garbage a year.
As cities, states, and countries run out of room for their garbage, they look for places elsewhere on the planet to ship the stuff. New York City, for example, sends garbage by rail to landfills in Virginia, South Carolina, and other states. Garbage trains also run from Naples, Italy to Hamburg, Germany. Honolulu ships garbage 2,500 miles across the ocean from Hawaii to mainland destinations willing to dispose of it, for a price. Of course, it’s harder to find willing recipients for certain kinds of garbage, such as hazardous waste, which may be corrosive, reactive, ignitable, carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, infectious, or radioactive. This garbage requires special handling and disposal. Billions of tons of hazardous waste were improperly disposed of before congress established management and liability laws in 1976 and 1980. Quite a bit has been disposed of improperly even after that legislation. According to the EPA, there are 36,000 contaminated sites across the U.S. that still have to be cleaned up, which means more garbage to haul away and deposit some place.
Not counted in the above tonnage is waste from nuclear reactors. The U.S. must find a place to dispose of 2,200 tons of such radioactive waste each year. About 32,000 tons of the stuff is piling up around nuclear facilities, since there’s no place to send it. There’s more stored at research facilities around the country, such as the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state, which has 53 million gallons of radioactive waste in huge tanks. Radioactive materials can be dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Temporary storage is risky. One million gallons of waste at Hanford have already leached into the soil. The much-anticipated “permanent” resting place for America’s radioactive waste was to have been Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but the license for that project has been withdrawn by the government.
Also not counted in the above totals for U.S. garbage per year are waste products from chemical and petroleum industries and raw sewage from humans and animals. Over 900 billion gallons of storm water mixed with human sewage is discharged into U.S. waters yearly by systems designed to overflow in wet weather, and an additional 3-10 billion gallons of human waste accidentally escapes from other sewage treatment facilities. Animal waste amounts to about a billion tons a year. Some of that ends up contaminating fresh water supplies. Several E. coli outbreaks have been traced to waste product-contaminated lettuce, spinach, and other produce downstream from huge animal operations.
So what can we do with all our garbage, when we can’t find places to stash it on land? The answer for some has been to dump it into the oceans.
Estimates vary, but judging from the vast islands of garbage floating in the Pacific and Atlantic, one patch said to be the size of Texas, there are hundreds of millions of tons garbage out there, and it’s growing every year. Of course, there’s a lot more garbage that gets pumped into the oceans in liquid form, such as the millions of gallons of oil from the failed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and untold millions, billions, of gallons of toxic chemicals we wash down the drain, into streams and rivers, and out to sea.
The biggest share of the world’s garbage comes from the U.S., whose 5 percent of the world population generates about 40 percent of its garbage. But as other countries adopt American ways, their production of garbage is catching up. China and India, with a combined 40 percent of the world’s population, are particularly worrisome in this regard.
I don’t often illustrate my posts with ads, but the one above is just too appropriate to pass up. “From our planet’s point of view, there’s no throwing garbage out. Because there is no ‘out.’” Those words, together with the picture of a globe of garbage, aptly describe what has become of our little planet, our little planet whose ever-growing, ever-consuming population of humans is trashing it, our little Garbage Planet.
UPDATE: Trafigura, a London-based oil trading company that was prosecuted for dumping toxic waste in Africa, has been fined $1.25 million, and one of its employees as well as the captain of the ship that transported the waste Africa in 2006 were given suspended prison sentences by a Dutch court. Reportedly, 30,000 Africans required medical treatment following exposure to the waste. A Greenpeace spokesperson quoted in the UK’s Guardian said, “This is a first step towards justice and a clear signal to other companies that the illegal export of waste to Africa will not go unpunished.”
UPDATE2: An amendment by Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash) to continue funding for the Yucca Mountain Nevada nuclear waste site was defeated. According to NTI, this proposal by Senator Murray “put her at odds with Senate Majority Leader Reid and President Obama, both of whom have pushed to close the Yucca site.” Senator Reid represents the state of Nevada. Washington state is the home of the Hanford site, with its millions of gallons of nuclear waste. “Without a national repository Hanford and other nuclear waste sites will be left in limbo,” Murray said.
UPDATE3: Debris and radioactive particles have been washed into the Pacific by tsunamis and thousands of tons of water poured on leaking nuclear reactors, as a consequence of the the Japanese earthquake disaster of 2011. Ocean currents will carry these materials around the world, depositing them on beaches, collecting them in vast oceanic garbage patches, and infiltrating bits of them into the food chain.
As cities, states, and countries run out of room for their garbage, they look for places elsewhere on the planet to ship the stuff. New York City, for example, sends garbage by rail to landfills in Virginia, South Carolina, and other states. Garbage trains also run from Naples, Italy to Hamburg, Germany. Honolulu ships garbage 2,500 miles across the ocean from Hawaii to mainland destinations willing to dispose of it, for a price. Of course, it’s harder to find willing recipients for certain kinds of garbage, such as hazardous waste, which may be corrosive, reactive, ignitable, carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, infectious, or radioactive. This garbage requires special handling and disposal. Billions of tons of hazardous waste were improperly disposed of before congress established management and liability laws in 1976 and 1980. Quite a bit has been disposed of improperly even after that legislation. According to the EPA, there are 36,000 contaminated sites across the U.S. that still have to be cleaned up, which means more garbage to haul away and deposit some place.
Not counted in the above tonnage is waste from nuclear reactors. The U.S. must find a place to dispose of 2,200 tons of such radioactive waste each year. About 32,000 tons of the stuff is piling up around nuclear facilities, since there’s no place to send it. There’s more stored at research facilities around the country, such as the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state, which has 53 million gallons of radioactive waste in huge tanks. Radioactive materials can be dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Temporary storage is risky. One million gallons of waste at Hanford have already leached into the soil. The much-anticipated “permanent” resting place for America’s radioactive waste was to have been Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but the license for that project has been withdrawn by the government.
Also not counted in the above totals for U.S. garbage per year are waste products from chemical and petroleum industries and raw sewage from humans and animals. Over 900 billion gallons of storm water mixed with human sewage is discharged into U.S. waters yearly by systems designed to overflow in wet weather, and an additional 3-10 billion gallons of human waste accidentally escapes from other sewage treatment facilities. Animal waste amounts to about a billion tons a year. Some of that ends up contaminating fresh water supplies. Several E. coli outbreaks have been traced to waste product-contaminated lettuce, spinach, and other produce downstream from huge animal operations.
So what can we do with all our garbage, when we can’t find places to stash it on land? The answer for some has been to dump it into the oceans.
Estimates vary, but judging from the vast islands of garbage floating in the Pacific and Atlantic, one patch said to be the size of Texas, there are hundreds of millions of tons garbage out there, and it’s growing every year. Of course, there’s a lot more garbage that gets pumped into the oceans in liquid form, such as the millions of gallons of oil from the failed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and untold millions, billions, of gallons of toxic chemicals we wash down the drain, into streams and rivers, and out to sea.
The biggest share of the world’s garbage comes from the U.S., whose 5 percent of the world population generates about 40 percent of its garbage. But as other countries adopt American ways, their production of garbage is catching up. China and India, with a combined 40 percent of the world’s population, are particularly worrisome in this regard.
I don’t often illustrate my posts with ads, but the one above is just too appropriate to pass up. “From our planet’s point of view, there’s no throwing garbage out. Because there is no ‘out.’” Those words, together with the picture of a globe of garbage, aptly describe what has become of our little planet, our little planet whose ever-growing, ever-consuming population of humans is trashing it, our little Garbage Planet.
UPDATE: Trafigura, a London-based oil trading company that was prosecuted for dumping toxic waste in Africa, has been fined $1.25 million, and one of its employees as well as the captain of the ship that transported the waste Africa in 2006 were given suspended prison sentences by a Dutch court. Reportedly, 30,000 Africans required medical treatment following exposure to the waste. A Greenpeace spokesperson quoted in the UK’s Guardian said, “This is a first step towards justice and a clear signal to other companies that the illegal export of waste to Africa will not go unpunished.”
UPDATE2: An amendment by Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash) to continue funding for the Yucca Mountain Nevada nuclear waste site was defeated. According to NTI, this proposal by Senator Murray “put her at odds with Senate Majority Leader Reid and President Obama, both of whom have pushed to close the Yucca site.” Senator Reid represents the state of Nevada. Washington state is the home of the Hanford site, with its millions of gallons of nuclear waste. “Without a national repository Hanford and other nuclear waste sites will be left in limbo,” Murray said.
UPDATE3: Debris and radioactive particles have been washed into the Pacific by tsunamis and thousands of tons of water poured on leaking nuclear reactors, as a consequence of the the Japanese earthquake disaster of 2011. Ocean currents will carry these materials around the world, depositing them on beaches, collecting them in vast oceanic garbage patches, and infiltrating bits of them into the food chain.