by Victoria Malone
Without telling a story about it just yet, I invite you to consider your relationship with waste. Maybe on your trash day this week, you took your trash bag or bin to the side of the road. How heavy was it? Is this your typical amount of waste? Is there any type of waste that frequents your bag on its many trips to the dumpster?
We all have a way we relate to the excess in our lives. Maybe you've given this relationship some thought before, or maybe it's one of those commonplace things in life that has flown beyond the radar of your thoughts. Maybe you know the magnitude of a landfill, or maybe you've never quite considered how much our collective waste can pile up. Either way, our relationship to waste holds increasing weight. Our landfills are running out of space at rates quicker than planned for. New landfills are placed closer and closer to communities that bear the brunt of adverse health effects from toxic chemical exposure, as well as displacing wildlife crucial to our shared, living landscapes.
I don't know that I would have really considered my relationship with waste before visiting countries without a strong public waste infrastructure. Among the beauty of mountains and beaches, pieces of trash line the streets and boat-docking bays. Trash lays out in plain sight as people walk and drive by, seeming not to notice or be bothered by the piles of waste.
While shocking at first, this lack of public waste management brought me face-to-face with the consequences of our excesses. Rather than being able to forget the plastic bags and crinkled wrappers which are carried out of sight each week in my home town, I experienced this accumulation that refused to be forgotten. Beautiful, breath-taking landscapes littered with colorful wrappers, like confetti commemorating the processed snacks of days past. This tension was uncomfortable to witness, to smell, and to walk through. As uncomfortable as it is, it's also a tension that can call us into greater responsibility in our relationship with waste.
In countries with more established waste management infrastructure, we rarely see this tension in such stark contrast. One scenario where we may see this tension outright is when garbage workers go on strike. I was twelve when visiting Toronto during the 2009 Toronto Strike caused by a municipal labor dispute. I remember those public metal bins that line the streets every twenty feet or so, and each one was overflowing with waste. It was summer, so the smell steeped in the air throughout the long, hot days. I remember it felt so wrong to place a napkin or a plastic cup on the growing piles of trash. Adding to the waste at that point felt somewhat ridiculous.
What if we felt a similar ridiculousness about adding more trash to our already filled landfills?
Reflecting on this experience not only emphasizes the critical importance of our waste workers, but also brings to the surface this world of waste that normally lays out of sight and out of mind. In an article by Myra Hird, professor of Environmental Science at Queens University in Canada, she writes that landfills are "sites of forgetting", where "waste is a monument to all that we once wanted and now do not want, once valued and no longer value." Our wants may change with trends, but what if our values centered more solidly around care for each other and for our shared, beautiful landscape? How would this shift our trends, where passing fads could be reused or repurposed rather than quickly thrown away and forgotten?
In Dallas, most of our waste goes into the McCommas Bluff landfill, the largest landfill in the state and 15th largest in the nation as of 2010. Not much has been written about the landfill in the last 10-15 years. From what I could find, though, the landfill has been generally well-managed, as far as landfill management goes. The tension exists here between a landfill serving its purpose as a disposal site, and the surrounding beauty of the McCommas Bluff where the Trinity River is nearly impassable because of the piles of waste. “This is an economy of convenience built on the destruction of one of the most unique wild places we have in Dallas. This is a cathedral of our history. But now, instead of it being a place we should be celebrating, tying old Dallas into the new, we treat it as a landfill. And it’s awful to think about," says Ben Standifer in a Dallas Morning News article by Robert Wilonsky.
Dallas is experiencing this tension just like any other town or city in the world, each with its own unique landscape and wild ecosystem. On these beautiful lands, what do we do with our waste? How can we look at the unique landscapes that sustain so much life and reconcile the fact that we have turned some of them into wastelands?
These are difficult questions. It is not attractive to acknowledge the amount of waste we have allowed to pile up out of sight, out of mind. It is deeply uncomfortable to imagine these wastelands and their contamination as our continued legacy for future generations.
Feeling uncomfortable will not destroy us, but continuing to create wastelands might. We can choose to feel uncomfortable while at the same time working towards more sustainable solutions. Maybe we can even expand our capacity for holding this uncomfortable tension while leaning into the small actions that create a new environmental ethic for future generations. We can acknowledge our current reliance on plastic, and we can replace single-use products with multi-use containers, towels, napkins, and other daily companions that we can reuse rather than toss after each use. And we can know that there are bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals working with us to regenerate a livable environment for all of life.
I've adapted some questions from Time To Recycle, an organization serving the North Central Texas region, to help further reflect on our relationship with waste:
- Can I give this item a second life by reusing or repurposing?
- Could this item be recycled or composted rather than being tossed into a landfill?
- Can I reduce my contributions to landfills by selling or donating this item responsibly?
While the solution isn't with any one individual, questions like these can aid our collective reflection, education, and action. We can shift our shared values towards one that witnesses and remembers our waste, and which manifests as care for our neighbors and the environment.
The next time you take out the trash, with as little self-judgement as possible, you can reflect on some of these questions. You can learn where your trash is taken to, and you can get involved in efforts that allow reusing, recycling, and composting. In Dallas, there is the company Recycle Revolution, which provides "zero waste services for [individuals and] businesses of all shapes and sizes." There are also fun, active ways to get involved, like kayaking on the Trinity River and picking up trash with Trinity Corridor Paddlesports. We can build an environmental ethic that steers away from endless excess and moves closer to communal care, and we can make this collective responsibility both fun and engaging!
Thank you for reflecting on this topic with me, and let us know the creative ways that you have learned to live with less waste.
Written by a human with minimal intervention from A.I.