Waste is a term that covers many materials. There is what might be called household waste: the stuff we place in the garbage collection containers to be trucked away each week. Then there are the body excretions to be disposed of and industrial wastes from unsold clothing to radioactive wastes from nuclear reactors. Oliver Franklin-Wallis discusses them all in his book Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future. Here, we will focus on the household stuff we throw away.
The method of disposing of unwanted objects has traditionally been to just dump them far enough away from where we resided so that we could forget about them. As population density increased, a bit of planning became necessary. Societies would establish formal dumpsites and control how much could be accumulated before a new site must be established. The term landfill came to be used for planned dumpsites. Large-scale accumulations of garbage initiate serious environmental problems.
“Today the solid waste industry contributes 5 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions—more than the entire shipping and aviation industries combined. As it decomposes, rubbish produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps many times more heat than carbon dioxide. Landfills ooze leachate, a waste industry term for the noxious black or yellow sludge that forms from the putrefying rubbish. Leachate is a noxious smoothie of every chemical and by-product you can imagine—acids, heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, and other poisons and carcinogens, which can leak down into the water table or into rivers, and into our water supply.”
Franklin-Wallis takes the reader to waste dumping gone insane in India at New Delhi.
“This is Ghazipur landfill, a mountain not of stone, but of garbage—14 million metric tons of it. Piled 71 yards high and covering an area of 69 acres, it is the largest of three mega-landfills that ring Delhi.”
This dump site is actually an example of recycling as thousands of people try to make a living out of salvaging things from the mountain of garbage.
“Worldwide, 37 percent of our waste is landfilled, according to the World Bank; fully another third ends up in open dumpsites. Waste management is expensive…whereas dumping costs virtually nothing, so, as the global population has boomed, mega-dumps like Ghazipur have proliferated.”
If one wishes to have modern, ecologically sound landfills, one can contain the waste in barriers that prohibit leakage of waste, but barriers don’t last forever, and this process only delays the inevitable poisoning of the environment.
Countries that can afford waste management add incineration and recycling to the menu of options, with each choosing its own mixture of options. Some have found incineration attractive because it can be done in such a way that useful energy can be captured in so called “energy-from-waste” (EfW) sites.
“In the UK and Europe, at least, landfills are a dying business. (The same is not true in the US or Australia, which send 50 percent and 30 percent of waste to landfill, respectively.) In 1996, the UK government introduced a landfill tax, to encourage recycling rates…Anything that cannot be sent for recycling or composted is increasingly burned inside energy-from-waste (EfW) plants.”
“The reason for landfill’s decline is not, as was once feared, that we are running out of room for them (quite the contrary—empty land is easy to find). Rather they have become obsolete, unable to compete with recycling and energy generation on cost, as well as politically unpopular.”
“In the UK, the percentage of waste that ends up burned has grown from 9 percent in 2001 to 48 percent in 2021—a 435 percent increase. In the European Union, which burns just over a quarter of its trash, incinerators power 18 million homes. Sweden burns roughly 50 percent of its waste, Japan 78 percent. Denmark, which burns four-fifths of its household waste, has built so many EfW plants that the country now has to import 1 million metric tons of waste per year to keep them running effectively. China, which has built more than 300 EfW plants since the 1990s, burns 580,000 metric tons of rubbish every day.”
Incineration seems a curious form of waste management progress when global warming is becoming a more urgent issue. And burning garbage can emit all sorts of dangerous chemicals if not highly regulated. Modern systems try to burn at a high enough temperature that dangerous compounds can be decomposed. Nevertheless, it cannot be considered a clean energy source, and people who live near incinerators tend to have worse health problems than people who do not.
“Even so, incinerators’ emissions are substantial: in the UK, energy-from-waste plants have been found to emit more CO2-equivalent per kilowatt hour generated than coal power stations while regulators in New York found that even incinerators that comply with air quality legislation can release up to twice as much lead, four times as much cadmium, and up to fourteen times as much mercury as coal.”
The roughly third of waste that does not get deposited on land is divided between incineration and recycling. Both options depend on companies being able to make money in the process. Therefore, market forces will arise and the two modes will be in competition. Recycling will be economically efficient for some materials and less so for others. Plastics will be the major problem.
“The environmental benefits of recycling are manifold. Recycling an aluminum can requires roughly 92 percent less energy and emits 90 percent less carbon than making one from virgin material; for every ton of aluminum saved, you’re also saving eight metric tons of bauxite ore from being mined from the ground. Recycling one ton of steel requires just a quarter of the energy of mining it new, cuts the associated air pollution by 86 percent, and saves around 3.6 barrels of oil. Recycled glass requires 30 percent less energy to produce, paper 40 percent less, copper 85 percent. By recycling most materials, we’re not only reducing the greenhouse gases required in production, but the environmental damage caused by extraction: the logging, mining, processing, and transportation required in replacing the item with new. Recycling creates less water and air pollution.”
“It is also better for the economy. Globally, the recycling industry employs millions of people; the market for scrap metal alone is worth more than $280 billion. Studies have shown that recycling schemes create 70 jobs for every one that would be created by landfill or incinerators. And the scale is enormous: 630 million metric tons of steel scrap is recycled globally every year. It’s estimated that 99 percent of the metal in scrapped cars, for example, ends up reused. Of all the copper ever mined, 80 percent is still in circulation. In the UK, three quarters of glass waste is recycled into new bottles, fiberglass, or other materials.”
The situation with plastic is quite different both economically and environmentally. Plastics are so useful that production is huge and growing.
“More than 480 billion plastic bottles are sold worldwide every year—approximately 20.000 every second…And that’s just one household item. (It’s not even the most numerous. That dubious honor goes to the four trillion plastic cigarette filters flicked to the ground and stamped out annually.”
Plastics are made from the residuals left from refining fossil fuels. Consequently, they are readily available and cheap to produce. They were long marketed as having the advantage of being throwaway items. However, they have severe health and environmental issues that are just now being recognized and studied.
“When plastics are broken down, by ultraviolet radiation, by the elements, or by force, they do not disintegrate so much as divide, their chain-like structures splitting into smaller and smaller pieces of themselves. Macroplastics become microplastics become nanoplastics. By then they are small enough to enter our blood streams, our brains, the placentas of unborn children. The impacts of these materials on our bodies are only just beginning to be understood; none are likely to be good.
Every time we drink from a plastic bottle, we are ingesting plastic particles. Every time an infant is provided formula in a plastic bottle and sucks on a plastic nipple, it ingests plastic particles. Every time we drive our cars, we cover the land and fill the air with plastic particles from the tires. Every time we wash our plastic clothes, we emit enormous numbers of plastic fibers into our water systems. There are so many plastic particles in our waterways that enjoying a sea breeze means you are inhaling plastic particles given off by the ocean water.
Plastics have the curious tendency to attract other pollutants found in whatever medium they exist, including dangerous compounds and even pathogens. Although drinking from a plastic container will send particles into your digestive system, they will get broken down into smaller particles in the process. With each fracture, exposure to the chemicals in the plastic increases. If the fractured particle is small enough it can enter into the blood stream. These things should be of concern, but they haven’t been until now.
“More than 10,000 additives can be used to make plastic, of which around 2,400 are potentially hazardous, according to EU safety standards, including plasticizers, flame retardants, dyes, lubricants, antistatic compounds, deodorizers and foaming agents. The exact recipe depends on the base plastic being used and the purpose of the end product. The plastics industry is notoriously secretive about these additives; a recent study found that more than 2,000 known plastic additives have been ‘hardly studied’ for their impacts on human health and are under-regulated in many parts of the world.”
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a commonly used plastic in making plastic bottles, for example.
“In 2021, scientists at Brunel University found that recycled PET leached 150 different chemicals into drinks—including toxicants such as antimony, BPA, and numerous endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) such as phthalates—at a greater rate than virgin PET. Like all PET bottles, they also shed microplastics.”
Endocrine disrupting chemicals are particularly dangerous because they resemble the hormones used by humans and other animals. Thus, they can trick the body into responding to them when it shouldn’t, or generate a totally foreign response. We cannot perform experiments on humans, but we can study the effects of exposure to such chemicals on other animals. The results are frightening.
“The health impacts of this are, as yet, unclear. However, human and animal studies have shown compelling links between phthalates, a common class of plasticizers, and lower fertility, developmental issues, obesity, and cancer.”
Recycled plastic is not the same as virgin plastic. It can be used, but it accumulates more impurities and damage every cycle. Thus, it can be used only a few times and only along with a component of virgin material. Unlike metals and paper products, there is no economic advantage to recycling plastics—they are always more expensive than virgin material. The plastic industries were forced to take up the promotion of recycling by the force of public opinion. Franklin-Wallis describes campaigns that were shams aimed mainly at avoiding any sort of regulation of their practices.
“Over the years a kind of playbook emerged: plastics companies would make big promises about moving to more recycled content and even open new recycling facilities, only to abandon them when attention moved on.”
“In the early 1990s, Coca-Cola announced a goal to make its bottles from 25 percent recycled plastic, only to abandon the target four years later once consumer and political pressure had lifted. In 2007, the company made headlines again when it set out to ‘recycle or reuse 100% of its plastic bottles in the U.S.’ and to achieve this, opened the ‘world’s largest PET recycling plant’ in Spartanburg, South Carolina. In reality, the company missed its recycling target and quietly shut down the plant two years later. Coke’s target of using 10 percent recycled plastic in its bottles by 2010? Missed. It set a target of 25 percent recycled content in its bottles by 2015 and failed to meet even half that. They’re not alone. PepsiCo and Nestlé, among others, have all previously failed to reach plastics recycling targets. This is partly a failure of journalism: pledges get news coverage. Few ever check later to see if they come true.”
Almost without realizing it, the world and the animals
living on it have been inundated with plastic particulates and the chemicals of
which they are comprised. This cannot be
healthy. It could be an existential
threat. Evidence of health threats is
not yet convincing, but the annual production of plastics will continue and
accelerate. Yearly production is
expected to quadruple by 2050. Recycling
is not the answer. The only apparent
solution is to stop making plastics, but we have become so dependent upon them
that this can not happen anytime soon. We
seem destined to follow this path until it is too late to respond, much like
our experience with climate change. Sigh….
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