In the early days of the last century, the city of New York faced a serious horse-manure crisis. “Experts” were predicting that by 1930, the stuff would be piled three stories high in the streets. But then, just in time, a savior in the form of the automobile came along, and New York dodged that one. (The literal version, at least. Metaphorically, New York might be the horse-manure capital of the world.)
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Well, as either Yogi Berra or Niels Bohr once said, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.”
New York still has a waste problem. The city’s sewer system does its part, but there are other kinds of waste — and a lot of it. And the stuff has to go somewhere.
So the city does with its waste (much of it, anyway) what it does with its criminals. That is, it ships it upstate. About 1,500 tons of it every day.
The stuff goes to Seneca Falls, about 250 miles away, in the Finger Lakes region of the state. Beautiful country — if you don’t count Seneca Meadows, New York’s largest landfill, which Jesse McKinley describes in a thoroughly engaging New York Times article as:
Rising nearly 300 feet … it’s almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty, including its pedestal.
A decades-old depository of millions of tons of garbage, sprawled over more than 350 acres, it’s an artificial overlook visible from miles away. For homes to the east, it causes an early sunset.
The site is due to close, according to the permits, in a couple of years. The company that operates it wants to expand — which, one thinks, is the better choice. The landfill is already there. And one cannot imagine what would slow down the creation of new garbage the way the automobile reduced the production of horse manure.
And the stuff, after all, has to go somewhere.
One thing that Americans — along with the rest of the world — can be relied upon to produce is garbage. More than 2 billion tons of it annually, according to one estimate, though one does wonder who came up with that figure and how. The global catastrophe–prediction industry can be quick with apocalyptic numbers.
Still … modern life does, undeniably, produce a lot of garbage.
It sometimes seems that we produce some things just to turn them into garbage. Between production and disposal, they serve no useful purpose. There is no intermediate utility. A lot of what we are encouraged to recycle after we have used it doesn’t need to be used in the first place.
This insight occurred to me a couple of days after I’d read McKinley’s article. It isn’t original to me, by any means, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about garbage. I leave that kind of big think to others.
Anyway, I was hungry and decided to make myself a peanut butter sandwich. I found a jar that hadn’t been opened. Which meant that before I could unscrew the lid, I had to get rid of a plastic seal that secured it.
Okay. Fair enough, I thought, recalling the Tylenol killer. Somebody with an esoteric grudge might want to poison peanut butter. This seal would certainly protect against that. I had to use a knife and nearly cut myself getting rid of that plastic barrier so I could get to the jar’s lid.
Which I unscrewed uneventfully.
But I still wasn’t home.
There was a plastic cover, stretched taut over the jar and standing between me and the peanut butter.
I cut it away with the knife.
While enjoying my lunch, I wondered why there should be two impediments between me and that peanut butter. Why are the things we give our kids for Christmas wrapped in those infernal blister packs that doubtless cause a lot of emergency room visits? Why are things that are already sealed in plastic put into plastic shopping bags when you pay up and check out? Why, when you cruise the aisles at the supermarket, do you see so many items wrapped in plastic? And why, when you see a cardboard box, can you depend on finding, when you open it, that the product inside will be securely contained in plastic? (RELATED: Biden’s Environmental Tent Cannot Stand)
I couldn’t come up with a good answer.
But when you think about it, a lot of what we throw away never served any real purpose, anyway.
It just goes into that landfill upstate. Or wherever.
I suppose you could make an argument for “recycling” that plastic. But why reuse something that didn’t need to be used in the first place?
If New York ships 1,500 tons of garbage, every day, to a landfill 250 miles away, how much diesel fuel is burned in the process? And what part of that is consumed in order to ship a lot of useless and annoying plastic? Think of all the carbon dioxide. (Which, in greenspeak, is called, simply, “carbon,” as that sounds considerably more ominous. Carbon dioxide is what plants and trees consume in photosynthesis, which is a natural process.)
But back to the point.
Which is not the landfill, though it does speak volumes that the city of New York takes its garbage to a remote location, where it leaves, as McKinley writes, “an ever-shifting stench which has inspired comparisons to dumpsters and dirty diapers, rancid meat and rotting fruit, as well as online maps of where ‘it stinks.’”
And where the groundwater must be constantly tested for toxicity, as, sometimes, things leach from that landfill.
New York is making a big push on recycling, and — who knows? — it may work. An incentive might be to put its waste in landfills closer to home so that Manhattanites could enjoy some of what people in the Seneca experience. Recycling is fine. Though one wonders just how much New Yorkers will comply. But, one wonders, why not “unicycle”? Just don’t use the plastic in the first place. No more having to get through two and three plastic barricades to get into the peanut butter.
And call it a win for the environment.
