Meditations: Rubbish and Resources

My guidebook has a “responsible camping” section, which consists of instructions to limit one’s impact on the environment and ecology of the areas through which one treks. In a country like Mongolia, whose appeal (partially) relies on its seemingly untouched landscapes, and which is home to some of the few completely intact ecosystems in the world, low-impact camping is pretty important. I can appreciate that, no matter how inconvenient carrying trash around for weeks is.

So I was a bit surprised when, while making dinner on the steppe, my Mongolian guide just disposed of trash by dropping it on the ground. Wet wipes and newspaper I could clench my teeth and deal with, but when he left the tinned-meat can and plastic wrappers just sitting there, I furtively picked them up and packed them into a plastic bag to dispose of at a later date. When we finally got to Darkhad, the trash was given to the mother of the family we stayed with to get rid of more responsibly. But what does getting rid of trash “more responsibly” mean? One day, I noticed by the cabins a little mini-landfill next to the family’s toilet. (I think the landfill may have been in a past toilet, actually.) There was the trash, still taking up space, still looking ugly and disrupting the natural landscape. So taking the trash here wasn’t any better than littering, I thought.

But then I realized: Wait, what is the difference between this mini-landfill and our own landfills? I’m (shamefully) not sure exactly how trash disposal works in the US, and though I know there is a concept of “incineration,” there are also landfills, so I don’t know exactly how much trash becomes ash and how much is carted away to out-of-sight garbage dumps. In any case, Staten Island is proof that there are landfills to which at least some of our trash goes to rot away over centuries or millennia or more. But, unlike with the family landfills of the nomads, we don’t see these dumps (and in the case of Staten Island, we actively avoid them). When I think about it, that actually strikes me as a worse method than the Mongolian way. Just like we can go to a supermarket and pick up processed packages of “pork” or “beef,” without having to confront the fact that what we are eating is in fact killed animal, muscle and fat and nerves, we can place our Doritos wrappers and plastic forks into clean plastic bags and have them disappear from the tops of our driveways. This, actually, seems pretty irresponsible. We should have to deal with the waste we produce; we should have to understand the ecological price of all that Styrofoam. I’m not saying we ought to coat the streets with our filth or allow it all to pile up in our living rooms (like Sarah Stout) and out the doors until we have to move our whole town (like Springfield), but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have to drive by landfills on a daily basis. Or take our trash to the town dump where we can see it all pile higher and higher. If we see the results of our lifestyle, maybe that would make it harder to ignore, and perhaps even be an impetus for change?

But okay, how would we change our lifestyle? How much unnecessary trash do we really produce? We recycle our plastics and magazines and take our canvas bags to the store—so that’s pretty good, right? Sure, but I think there’s still a lot more trash than we think about. After coming from the countryside back to UB, I watched a single lemon I bought get wrapped up in saran wrap for my purchasing ease, and I bought the packaged set of apples and of peppers. A lot of the food we eat is packaged, and we can avoid that waste just by making our own bread, for example, or cookies or lasagna. (Which also means fresh, homemade food!) And in my case, at least, there’s more than that—all those wet wipes for cleaning while camping instead of cloth. And keeping my to-do lists on notebook paper instead of my computer is easier, but isn’t that environmentally irresponsible?

Okay, now I’m being nitpicky. Which brings me to my next point: a partial disavowal of most of what I’ve said. There is more to environmentalism than waste disposal. Resource use is also a big factor. And surprisingly, some “environmental” behaviors are also majorly resource-heavy. (Though none are quite as bad as flying hundreds of people into Copenhagen or using valuable money to buy fake carbon credits.) I’ve heard (but cannot confirm) that recycling paper actually requires more energy and even creates more waste than just cutting trees and creating new paper. Making a ceramic mug supposedly requires the material and energy of 1,000 paper cups, meaning my mug that I bought and left in Oxford is actually ecologically unsound. (This, at least, makes me feel better about spending an entire summer using red Solo cups instead of buying a glass.) Of course, if throwing out paper and disposable plates, etc. uses up valuable space for litter, there are still environmental repercussions. However, a (somewhat dubious) study was recently released calculating that in 1,000 years, all the trash in the US would take up landfill space equaling about 35 square miles. To put it in perspective, that’s less than 8% of the area of Phoenix. (And as far as I’m concerned, putting the landfill right on top of the city would be more than environmentally responsible enough to make up for the landfill itself.) If that study is true, and the facts about the resources used to recycle or make non-disposable silverware are true, actually, creating trash might be the lesser evil. So, all in all, what does this mean for our lifestyle? Should we decrease our use of disposable items? Increase it? Use up our valuable time and energy to make our own food or stick to Doritos? Or does it all add up to not making a damn bit of difference? I’m inclined to think we should move from any and all trash/recycling arguments and focus on bigger environmental travesties like corn subsidies or golf courses. Or Phoenix.

Steppe Trash (At least it's all biodegradable... Wait, is goat horn biodegradable?)