Landfill Reflection

Landfill Reflection

Thomson Kirsch

People rarely think about what happens to their trash after they dispose of it. Why would they? It stops being their problem once they put their trash can on the curb to be picked up by their local trash collection agency (shout out to Waste Management). However, when one sees the amount of waste that a major metropolitan area like Denver generates, it can be a shock. The landfill mounds were the highest point for miles around, dwarfing the nearby buildings and natural hills. I have experience with landfills, as I used to work at the Baltimore County Bureau of Solid Waste Management, but even I was surprised by how large the Denver-Arapahoe Disposal Site (DADS) was. The projections are that it will last another 129 years, but, with any luck, sustainable practices will be implemented that prolong its life. On the other hand, it is just as likely that the increasing population of the Denver area will shorten its life span significantly. This, of course, must be avoided at all costs, and David Orr offers a solution in his book “The Earth in Mind: On education, environment, and the Human Prospect.” Orr suggests that if the education system had a larger focus on nature and humanity’s impact on it, more would be done to help the environment.

            My picture depicts several trash compactors, which, up close, are huge. However, in my picture, they seem toy-like against the volume of trash that they are pushing around and burying. I find this image to go nicely with the quote from Orr’s book, “It is widely assumed that the environmental problem will be solved with technology of one sort or another.” (Orr 2) We are using technology not to dispose of the trash in an environmentally-friendly, sustainable way, but just to bury it so that we do not have to look at it. This angers me, and it should anger anyone that is environmentally-conscious. When one thinks of the years of design and research it has taken us to be able to produce the compactors, you really start to see the truth behind Orr’s words. Think of the progress we would have made towards a more eco-friendly world if a tenth of the thought that had gone into those compactors went towards finding a more efficient, sustainable way of disposing of waste. But instead of having something vastly more beneficial to the planet, we have a machine that can push around and crush trash. All this while it is belching out large amounts of greenhouse gases that do an entirely different form of damage to the planet! I think that this machine perfectly reflects the problem with our way of thinking about the planet: we would prefer to find a short-term, cheap solution and pass the problem off to future generations than actually taking the time and effort to permanently address the problem. It seems that the greatest way anyone could ever help the planet would be to find a way to change this school of thought. If Orr’s ideas about necessary environmental education were thought of and implemented fifty years ago, one can only imagine that the world we live in today would be radically different than the one we currently inhabit, and we would definitely be closer to changing this short-sighted way of thinking (if we hadn’t already completely changed it). However, they were not, and, therefore, we still have machines that are exceedingly good at quickly and cheaply hiding the problem than fixing it.

Works Cited

Orr, David W. Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994. Print.