What should we do with all of our trash?
There are many societal challenges we face in sustaining and developing civilization. The National Academy of Engineering has broken these challenges down to 14 problem areas. One of these areas concerns the waste accumulating around the world at an alarming rate as populations and cities grow.
Waste is not often thought about by many people. But is out of sight and, therefore, out of mind really going to save the planet from the mess we are making of it? Though humans throughout their history have been discarders of trash, the last few decades have seen society slide into a complacency about waste that manifests itself in a “throwaway society.”
Attitudes toward waste disposal have largely not changed over time: Dig a hole, and fill it. To archaeologists, discarded waste is a mine of information about our ancestors, but modern landfills are far from being delights of historical interest. With a globally growing population, existing landfill sites have filled, and new sites have had to open. In many countries around the world, landfills are uncontrolled; in far too many cities, growing trash heaps are changing not only the landscape by their sheer size, but causing wider international pollution problems.
Atlanta, and Georgia as a whole, are typical of most of the U.S. in our approaches to waste and recycling. Across the country, about 70 percent of all waste ends up in landfills, compared with about 40 percent in Europe. Europeans are not only recycling more than Americans, but implementing better ways to recover energy from waste.
San Francisco is one of the leading cities in the U.S. for recycling; a policy forbids the dumping of recyclable or compostable materials in landfills. That city recycles or composts 80 percent of its waste and is working toward a 2020 zero-waste target. Part of the success in San Francisco has been to educate the public on benefits of recycling to the environment and economy.
Based on the San Francisco model, if the U.S. achieves 75 percent recycling, it would create 1.4 million new jobs in recycling industries nationwide. Clearly, there are both environmental and economic reasons for recycling.
In Georgia, improvements are happening. Industries such as Mohawk and Novelis, as well as groups such as the Georgia Recycling Coalition and charities such as One More Generation, lead the way in the education and practice of recycling and waste management. Georgia officials are taking up the challenge, an example being Mayor Kasim Reed’s CARTLANTA recycling campaign.
We should not become complacent; the waste problem is a worldwide challenge. Solutions to the problem will require globally coordinated engineering and education efforts.
David G. Bucknall is an associate professor at Georgia Tech.