Trash
Mountain
In America, most people know how and where to recycle. In
fact, I took a quick survey of my hall to see who said that they recycled well
and most said that they did. But after seeing how much waste is in the DADS
landfill, I believe that these students were not doing everything that they
could to keep trash out of the landfill. The landfill could have been easily
mistaken for a mountain because it towered over our small almost pathetic
looking bus. At that point, I realized that Americans were not doing enough to
compost and recycle our waste products.
When we slowly started to climb up the meandering path on the
landfill, we got a better look at the types of trash that people were throwing
away. A lot of the trash was plastic and cardboard. I felt appalled that so
many people would throw away things that could be recycled. That is when our
tour guide told us that three quarters of what is in the DADS landfill could
have been recycled. This means that if Americans were to be just a little bit
more careful, they would be able to reduce the expansion of most of the DADS landfill.
Our tour guide told us that if people did not change their recycling habits
that the landfill would be completely full in just over one hundred years. Most
of the trash in the landfill would accumulate in the last twenty years. This
means that if we don’t start to educate Americans about recycling, than our
trash will exponentially increase until we become buried alive.
When I heard these statistics, hopelessness started to rush
through me. The disorderliness of all the trash on the landfill made me realize
the chaos of our recycling habits. I couldn’t believe that people would risk
the wellness of the planet just because they were too lazy to recycle. Orr
perfectly explains why we still have discourse between what we think we know
and what is an educational failure. “The fact that we see them as disconnected events or fail to see
them at all is, I believe, evidence of a considerable failure that we have yet
to acknowledge as an educational
failure.” (Orr 2) In this case the educational failure is that we are
not acknowledging the fact that we are throwing away so many things that can be
recycled. If we do not change our ways soon, and acknowledge our educational
failure, this world will become Trash Mountain.'
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