Stone Guise
Project 1
“Trashy Terrain”
Our society throws more trash away
each day than one could ever imagine. A trip to DADs landfill made that
apparent to me. When you enter the landfill you are surrounded by hills. But
little do you know that these hills are concealing the tons of trash us
Americans dispose of each day. These hills cover acres and acres reaching
almost up to 300ft high. There you sit in the middle of DADs surrounded by
mountains of trash, trash that will always be beneath the soil and will remain
as long as this planet does.
When
travelling further in to the landfill you see the mountain of trash that is not
covered and is still in the process of being constructed. In the picture above
you see two massive trucks pouring what seems to be endless garbage on to the
hill. Just these two trucks seem like a lot of garbage being put in to our
earth, but this is only a small fraction of the trash dumped there each day. In
the short time we were there I witnessed about 5 trucks do this, and they come
endlessly throughout the day. Watching these trucks poised up with trash
spilling out is what really made me realize what we are doing to our planet.
The amount of waste we produce in one day is unreal, and there must be a way to
reduce it at some degree.
This trip to
the landfill made me realize how Americans need to cut back on the amount of
waste we create each day. This may be easier said than done. We buy food, we
eat it, and we throw away the packaging. We buy a product, we open it, and we
throw away the packaging and eventually the product itself. However what
Americans can do is make an effort to buy goods that are packaged in recyclable
material and actually recycle it. A very large portion of the material in the
landfill could be recycled, but instead will sit in the earth. Americans don’t
know enough about recycling, and this lack of knowledge is harming our planet. David Orr said, “Yet we continue to educate
the young for the most part as if there were no planetary emergency.” Orr is
saying Americans are not being educated about the state our planet is in and
what we can do to save it. An example of this is how people throw recyclable,
reusable items in to the landfill.
This
landfill is filling up. Dads will be filled in about 120 years, what will our
future generations do then? If we can’t stop putting out as much waste as we do
now our planet will eventually be covered in these trash filled hills.
Societies will have to be built on them and they will become the landscape that
we wake up to. There is not enough room in the world for all the trash we are
creating. It may not be an immediate issue for our generation, but if we don’t
fix ourselves we are harming our generations to come. Americans need to reduce
the amount of waste we are producing, me included, and help to make sure
landfills don’t overtake our environment.
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