Reflecting on the Landfill

Reflecting on the Landfill

As we drove through the gates of the landfill, I remember looking around at the barren hills that surrounded us and not thinking too much of them.  Little did I know that those “hills” were actually mountains of years worth of trash that had been compressed and buried.  During the trip to DADS, it really hit me just how much waste humans produce. What seemed like an unending dump was projected to be completely full in just 129 short years.  What would happen to the waste of our grandchildren and great grandchildren when our current landfills reach their capacity?  Another landfill will obviously need to be created, but there will only be so much space left.  This is a problem that many people choose to ignore because it does not affect them currently, but they do not realize just how much they are affecting their own valuable environment because they choose not to dispose of their compostable and recyclable materials properly.  The above photo illustrates just how much waste is produced by the city of Denver and surrounding areas.   The large tractor in the background appears to be much smaller than it actually is because of the sheer amount of trash that piles up every day, reaching higher and wider with every new load.

Furthermore, as a society, we need to drastically change the way that we think about trash.  Rather than just having it be “out of sight, out of mind,” we need to really focus on how we can reduce our waste to as minimal as possible and rely primarily on recyclable and compostable materials.  Although we are in the beginning stages of changing our perspective, we still have a long way to go before we can call ourselves a sustainable community.  The paradigm shift from a mechanical worldview to a holistic and ecological worldview that Capra describes is an important step in creating a more sustainable world.  Capra describes our shift as a “challenge to create sustainable communities…in which we can satisfy our needs without diminishing the chances of future generations.”  Visiting DADS really helped me to understand why properly disposing of waste is of such great importance.  The accumulation of garbage in landfills is a problem that is easily overlooked.  Most of us just throw something away and don’t give it a second thought.  This tiny action, that seems to have almost no consequences, is actually diminishing the chances of future generations by contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and just occupying and damaging valuable space on our planet.  At the rate we’re going, we could end up in a world that resembles the world in the Disney film Wall-E.  In the end, who would actually enjoy living on a planet dominated by trash and waste?

Capra, Fritjof. "Deep Ecology-A New Paradigm." The Web of Life. New York: Anchor, 1996. 1-13. Print.