WASTE

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

—JACQUES COUSTEAU

 

 

 

MUCH OF WHAT IS KNOWN ABOUT ancient civilizations comes from digging up their waste. Long after empires fall, after flags and flesh rot, garbage remains to tell stories about those civilizations. Although some texts have been retained, much of history is essentially constructed by historians through the act of reading trash.

Societies that produced little or no nondegradable waste are consequently less interesting to many archeologists and historians. Stories told by trash are “hard fact,” but oral histories passed down by indigenous peoples are often relegated to the status of allegory or myth. In fact, there’s a good chance that a society that “failed” to produce any lasting waste may not even exist in the orthodox historical record.

Within our current system, the life span of any particular artifact as waste is usually far longer than its life span as a useful tool. Let’s say I go to a food court at a mall and eat a meal with a disposable plastic fork. Let’s say I use the fork for five minutes before one of the tines breaks (as always seems to happen) and I throw it out. The fork goes in the garbage and is buried in the landfill. Let’s say this particular type of plastic takes five thousand years to break down (we’ll talk more later about what it means for plastic to break down). For every minute I used the fork it spends a thousand years as waste: a ratio of one to 526 million, a number so large it’s hardly meaningful to human minds. On a scale that’s easier to fathom, if we compressed the fork’s five thousand year existence to one year, the fork would have spent only six one-hundredths of a second as an object useful to me.

We can also take into account the millions of years previous that the carbon the plastic fork was made of spent as oil deep underground. In that even longer time frame the useful life of the fork is an imperceptibly short instant sandwiched between a very long time spent in the ground as oil and a very long time spent in the ground as waste. This is true for almost every physical item civilization produces, from cars to computers to fast food containers—they spend many eons in the ground as iron ore or coal or sand, are used a staggeringly short time, and then left as waste for thousands of years or longer.

It’s pretty easy to argue that, from a long-term perspective (and indeed from a short-term perspective), industrial civilization is essentially a complicated way of turning land into waste. It is, in all truth, “laying waste” to the earth.

What actually happens when we throw away something disposable? Say, something as ubiquitous as a plastic grocery bag?

In many countries, so many plastic bags are released into the environment that they’ve become widely regarded as a major menace. Because they’re so light, they can blow in the wind for great distances until they become snagged on something like a fence post or a sign. The sight of these bags fluttering in the wind has given rise to any number of disparaging nicknames. In China they’re called “white pollution.” In the US some know them as “urban tumbleweed.” And the sight of them is so common in South Africa that they’ve been sardonically dubbed the “national flower.”

But the problem runs deeper than mere aesthetics. Plastic bags mistaken for food can and often do kill animals who eat them. In the oceans, plastic now outweighs living creatures in many areas, a subject to which we’ll return a bit later. And in several South Asian countries, clots of discarded plastic bags have blocked drainage culverts used to carry human sewage.⁷

The impacts are worsened by the mind-boggling scale of plastic bag manufacturing. Americans use about 100 billion polythene bags per year.⁸ That seems big, and it is, but that number is dwarfed by global production of plastic bags, which exceeded 5 trillion in 2002.⁹ Five trillion. If you stopped sleeping and did nothing but watch plastic bags be produced at a rate of one per second, it would take nearly two thousand lifetimes to observe only one year’s worth of plastic bag production.¹⁰

Public outcries against the impacts of plastic bags on the environment have led to attempts at changing the chemical makeup of bags to try to make them less harmful. Some UV-degradable plastic grocery bags are treated with an additive called TDPA which accelerates their breakdown from sunlight. However, the plastic bags only break down into smaller, almost invisible, pieces of plastic. The polymer itself still takes at least a thousand years to break down. In the meanwhile, these small pieces of plastic are often confused for food by animals, especially marine animals. Eating the plastic can poison them, or obstruct or fill their digestive tracts, killing them.

Many countries have begun to take strict measures against discarding plastic bags. Because thinner bags wear out and are discarded sooner, South Africa has outlawed the sale of plastic bags less than 80 microns thick.¹¹ (Plastic grocery bags in North America are usually about 18 microns thick.) Taiwan and Bangladesh, two of the countries experiencing blockage of sewage drains, have banned free distribution of bags from stores.¹² India has taken especially strong action against plastic bags, with some states blaming them for the obstruction of drainage systems and the worsening of floods during monsoon rains. Two Indian states have banned the production, sale, and even use of plastic bags.¹³ In the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, a person using a plastic bag could be imprisoned for as long as seven years or fined up to two thousand dollars.¹⁴

And if you think you can turn to disposable paper bags instead, consider that disposable paper bags use more energy and produce more waste than plastic bags.¹⁵ The problem isn’t just with the plastic. It’s with the entire approach of disposability.

In the case of shopping bags, a superficial solution is easily available. Cloth bags are common, inexpensive, and indefinitely reusable. But this easy substitution is the exception, and not the rule, for common items made from plastic.

At our farm most of the water for gardening comes directly from rainwater, which we catch in barrels or ponds. We also have a number of trees beside the house who constantly shed leaves and twigs onto the roof and into the eaves trough. It’s been a wet few months and we haven’t needed much water, so it’s been quite a while since the eaves troughs have been cleaned. However, one section became stopped up entirely, and it was my job to climb a ladder and clean it out.

When I reached the roof I looked into the eaves trough and found a forest in miniature. Leaves and other organic matter had filled the trough completely. The wet lower layers had decomposed into a rich organic humus. The upper, more recent layers had stayed mostly intact and acted as a mulch, keeping the bottom layers from drying out, and also allowing air to reach into the mix.

Black locust and maple seeds had germinated in the humus and the trough was filled with tiny trees. I dug a little underneath the surface and found sow bugs and millipedes, indicators of other soil life thriving there.

A soil science textbook will tell you that soil is made up of air and water, the organisms who live in the soil, and a substrate made of mineral particles and decaying organic matter. Because of the leaf litter that had collected there, we had all but one of those. The basis of that tiny forest was trash by the original definition (fallen leaves and twigs). The only soil component we were missing was mineral particles like sand or clay—the tiny broken bits of stone or rubble that gave us the word rubbish.

Soil itself is essentially trash and rubbish, but the living creatures in it turn it into soil, the foundation of terrestrial life. Just as it is true that industrial civilization turns land into waste, life turns trash into land.

When I said earlier that waste is a matter of perspective, I was kind of lying. That’s true so far as some waste materials. But some other waste materials are simply waste materials. Trash from trees and trash from a computer factory are two very different things. Garbage from a dead animal is much different than garbage from a nuclear power plant. Radioactive waste from a nuclear power plant is dangerous to life for hundreds of thousands of years or longer. In contrast, the organic “waste” scraps from my dinner are turned into compost for gardening. Not only is that compost not harmful, it’s actively helpful both to the plants in the garden (weeds included) and to me.

Both materials are “waste” by the dictionary definition. But it seems silly, if not outright misleading, to use the same word to refer to something that kills all life, and then to turn around and use it to describe something highly beneficial to all life. We need to define exactly what we’re talking about when we say “waste.”

When I defecate outside, not only shit is left behind. There’s also toilet paper, or whatever else I use to clean myself up afterwards. The toilet paper almost invariably lasts longer on the ground than does the shit. During the winter the toilet paper gets broken into pieces by rain and pounded into the ground or carried off in rivulets. In the summer small mounds of off-white paper remain for months, or until I get sick of seeing them and toss them into the forest where they decompose out of my sight.

I sometimes wonder why it bothers me to see the toilet paper: by the time toilet paper hits the ground, it’s really just parts of trees ready to fold back into the forest, ready to come home. Although it looks like trash it’s really just litter. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it looks like waste.

I think a big part of the problem is not what I think and feel about seeing the toilet paper, but what I fear other people might think and feel about seeing it. Not many people come to my home, and those who do generally know me. I’m not worried about what they think. But sometimes—very rarely—someone I don’t know shows up: kids cutting through the forest, the meter reader, a botanist checking out plant habitat. And then I always wonder if they’re thinking, What the hell is this? (Note that I’m not worried about them noticing the piles of shit: they’d probably just think they came from dogs or bears, and in any case the brown of the shit blends well with the ground. The papers, on the other hand, stand out, and one of my fears, I suppose, is that if the stranger stares at them long enough, the stranger might figure out what they are. . . .)

For this reason and because I wanted to see if I could, at least in this little way, stop supporting the paper industry, I soon began experimenting with other materials. At first, inspired by tales of old Montgomery Wards catalogs in outhouses, I tried glossy junk mail. It was too slick and worked for only the most rudimentary cleaning, and seemed to take forever to decompose. I’m not sure how the old-timers put up with it. Then I tried newspapers, which, while they decomposed at about two-thirds the rate of toilet paper, cleaned only slightly better than the catalogs. I also wasn’t comfortable with the unsightly ink stains this might leave on my behind, and I especially wasn’t comfortable having all those ink toxins so close to an orifice. After that I tried those cotton balls that come in the tops of vitamin bottles, which work great. They’re soft and luxurious, and when I use them the only thing holding me back from feeling a sort of emperor-like decadence would be someone fanning me with a palm frond while discreetly looking away. But cotton balls are unfortunately in short supply, so I save them for my birthday and other special occasions. Orange peels work well, so long as I use the inside, not the outside, which is a bit tangy for my taste (and probably covered with pesticides). At first I was concerned about using orange peels, since I’ve read that in many places they can take decades to decay, but at least here that’s not true. Slugs love them, and the peels disappear within days or weeks. Banana peels work okay too, so long as, once again, you use the inside. But they, like cotton balls and orange peels, are in short supply. Nowadays I save all my used paper napkins from restaurants—they work great. And there’s the paper wrapping from recycled toilet paper rolls.

I’ve heard that some indigenous peoples use stones to clean themselves, but I haven’t figured out how to make that work. And of course people the world over use fingers, but I’m nowhere near that hardcore. Nor am I yet hardcore enough to use and (after washing) reuse cloth, although that would finally give me a use for my worn-out tube socks.

I know what you may be thinking: You live in a rainforest; why don’t you just use leaves? I have, and some work well. Thimbleberry leaves work great. The leaves are big, soft, and slightly fuzzy. My concern is that although there are a fair number of thimbleberry plants, each plant doesn’t contain a huge number of leaves, meaning each lost leaf would be at least somewhat significant to the plant. I tried cascara leaves, which are plentiful enough on those trees, but they’re a tad too slick. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to try pine, fir, hemlock, or redwood needles.

I wish blackberries didn’t have thorns, because they’re invasive, plentiful, and have tons of leaves. But the thorns aren’t limited to the canes, and also run down the spines of the leaves, which means the leaves’ use as toilet paper is at best suboptimal.

Here’s something else about toilet paper. The toilet paper I leave in a clearing remains relatively intact through the summer, not breaking down until the rains come. If, however, I leave toilet paper in the forest and return just one or two days later, I see that the stained part of the paper is gone, eaten by slugs, who clearly prefer to live in moist forests over open sunlight where trees have been removed.

I mention this for a few reasons. The first is that, if I got desperate, I suppose I could use slugs as toilet paper cleaners and reuse the toilet paper (er, maybe not). The second and far more important reason is that it returns us to the question of how long it takes for something to break down. Now, it may not matter much whether my toilet paper breaks down in six days or six months, but when you have a society producing toxic wastes lasting thousands, tens of thousands, or in some cases hundreds of thousands of years, the question of how long it takes for something to break down becomes far more important. But there’s an even more important reason, which is that it leads to the question of whether and how our “garbage,” our “refuse,” our “waste,” is useful or harmful to others in our landbase, and to our landbase in general. And this, of course, leads to the most important question of all: does our presence and do our actions help or harm the land who supports us, the land who is our home, the land on whom our own survival ultimately depends? It’s very simple: any way of living that doesn’t help the landbase—any way of living that doesn’t feed the soil what it needs to survive and thrive—will not last. This means that any way of living that produces waste that doesn’t help—or worse, harms—the plants and animals and fungi and bacteria and land and water and air upon whom that way of living—in fact, the species’ survival—depends, will not last.