Garbage Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Garbage Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Garbage is both obvious and difficult to define. We know it when we see it, but how is it different from other objects? The technical definition of garbage is “the offal of an animal used for food,” but it has also come to mean refuse in general. A more practical meaning would be that anything that has lost its usefulness and/or value is garbage. In this way, we also speak of garbage (and its siblings trash and rubbish) metaphorically-“Did you hear the garbage that candidate was saying,” “Those basketball players were really trash-talking in the final game,” “That book is pure rubbish.” It would seem, then, that garbage is all around us. Despite its ubiquity, however, many aspects of garbage are poorly understood. The quantity of garbage produced by each person and each country has only been estimated. Collection and management of garbage differs by locality, and is therefore difficult to generalize. Further, the relationship between human beings, garbage, and the environment is a complex and little-understood one.

Addressing these issues is not any easier than defining garbage itself. No entity counts its garbage, per se. Some places, however, do keep track of the amount of solid waste they produce. If we use this as a stand-in for garbage production, we come to a better, yet very partial understanding of garbage dynamics. For example, consider the following. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), municipal solid waste production among its member nations increased 14 percent between 1990 and 2000. There are, though, a number of problems with this statistic. First, not all countries use the same methods to measure their solid waste; many even use different definitions of solid waste to begin with. Second, many countries do not even keep or report statistics on waste. Even if we could solve these problems, we would still be left with the question of how representative the sample is; in other words, how well do the members of the OECD represent all of the countries in the world? The fact is that many of the members of the OECD are located in western Europe. The countries of North America (The United States, Mexico, and Canada) are also members. A few countries from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Central and South America are included. Overall, though, the statistics from the OECD are based on a large group of (relatively) developed nations. So, what have we learned? It would appear that the amount of garbage (in this case as the proxy solid waste) increased significantly in the decade of the 1990s. But what is happening with the garbage production of all of the countries who are not part of this number?

Garbage Management

The truth is, we cannot really know, but we can make some assumptions. The amount of garbage each country produces is largely determined by the affluence of that country. Rich people and countries produce more garbage than poorer people and countries. On the face of it, then, it would appear that the less-developed countries of the world, many of whom are not part of the OECD, would produce less garbage than the more developed OECD countries. However, many countries of the world are developing quickly. This means that the rate of increase in garbage production in these areas (and therefore in the world) may be higher than the OECD claims. As garbage production increases around the globe, countries and citizens are faced with the questions of collection, treatment, and disposal. The model on which many countries base their garbage management is the system in the United States.

Garbage management depends on a number of factors. For many people, the most obvious of these include the availability of resources, the composition of garbage, and the level of technology. Just as important as these factors, however, are cultural norms about what constitutes garbage and appropriate technology for dealing with it; local, state, and national politics; and social habits of production, consumption, and environmental management. Thus, while the rest of this discussion focuses on garbage management in the United States, it cannot be assumed either that it would be the same in other places, or that the United States itself does not have its own cultural norms and social habits that shape its management of garbage.

The United States generates the most waste per capita (about 1,540 pounds/year) of any country in the world. It continues to produce more waste every year. In 1990 the country produced 247 million tons of nonhazardous waste, while in 2001 that number jumped to 409 million tons. This waste includes substantial amounts of paper and cardboard (40 percent), as well as yard waste (18 percent), metals (9 percent), plastic (8 percent) and other products. In the United States, it is still predominantly the city or county who is responsible for managing all that garbage, despite the recent trend toward privatization of such services. In the United States as a whole, 64.1 percent of garbage is landfilled. There are regional differences in these statistics. For example, in New England only 36 percent of waste is landfilled while the rest is recycled or used in waste-to-energy facilities. On the other hand, in the Rocky Mountain region and the Midwest region, respectively 86 percent and 77 percent of waste is landfilled. The environmental impacts of such systems of waste management are much debated, but there is a general consensus that garbage contributes to air, water, and ground pollution.

Nature-Society Relationship

Garbologists, or archaeologists of garbage, argue that what we as a society throw away can tell us a lot about who we are. These researchers study the objects found in various locations from household waste receptacles to large municipal dumps. This garbage is then analyzed (weighed, measured, and identified) in order to address several broad themes, including social consumption practices and how they have changed over time, how these practices differ by location. The ability to understand particular people through their garbage is taken for granted in the cases of tabloid reporters and identity thieves who dig through VIPs’ trash in hopes of a story or useable information. While the work of the garbologist is directed at a larger scale, the principle is much the same. Many archaeologists of garbage contribute to larger issues of waste management by helping policy makers better understand the waste stream.

In addition to analyzing the waste stream, there is also significant interest in the distribution of garbage dumps, incinerators, and other waste management facilities. Environmental justice activists, for example, argue that garbage and the negative environmental effects it causes are unfairly distributed. Further, some activists and scholars argue that such facilities are disproportionately located in minority and/or poor communities. Whether this phenomenon is the result of intentional practices of locating dumps and incinerators in the neighborhoods of least resistance, or is due to structural constraints or the price of land, is up for debate. In this area of research, there is an important link between garbage, society, politics, and economics.

While many environmental activists, including those advocating for environmental justice, consider garbage as a risk to the environment and public health, there are other groups who consider garbage as a resource. These are mostly comprised of people who participate in the informal garbage economy by collecting, selling or recycling other peoples’ waste. In the United States, an individual looking for soda cans and plastic bottles to recycle is the most common form of this. Recreational dumpster diving, a popular activity in some U.S. cities, is another example. There are, however, many countries in other parts of the world where communities of scavengers live on large dumps and search for resalable items. It is important to note that this informal waste economy, in which garbage is considered a resource, often supplements formal recycling and disposal efforts. That is to say that many items are removed from the waste stream in this manner with no cost to the responsible government body. This reduces the amount of waste that needs to be disposed of in landfills and other facilities.

The need to manage garbage has long driven municipal policies in the United States and other areas. The existence of garbage in an urban area threatens the area’s image at the same time it attracts disease vectors such as bacteria, mice, rats, roaches, feral cats and dogs. For this reason, garbage collection and disposal became an essential part of the first sanitation programs in major U.S. cities around the turn of the 20th century. The irony of society’s garbage problem is that as the more developed a country becomes economically (particular in terms of replicating the mass consumer culture of the United States), the more garbage is produced. Garbage must be considered, not just a necessary side effect of development that can be managed with technology, but rather, an integral part of societies and environments that requires social, cultural, and political-economic understanding and solutions.

Bibliography:

V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000);
L. Pulido, S.Sidawi, et al, “An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Los Angeles,” Urban Geography (v.17, 1996);
W. Rathje and C. Murphy Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage (University of Arizona Press, 2001);
P. Simmons, N. Goldstein, S. Kaufman, N. Themelis, and J. Thompson, Jr., “The State of Garbage in America,” Bio-Cycle (v.47, 2006).