Garbage In, Garbage Out: Solving the Problems with Long-Distance Trash Transport

INTRODUCTION Everything Is Trash

INTRODUCTION Everything Is Trash Trash is an inherently contradictory material. On the one hand, it has attractive qualities, at least for some of us. Archaeologists delight in garbage because the cast-o√ things of peoples long gone tell us about how they lived and died. Kids and dogs paw through trash looking for fun, interesting, useful items, and discarded papers or photos can be a treasure trove of historical information. But trash is more than a potential fount of information: it is a fundamental indicator of life. Much as the acrid, black smoke emanating from industrial smokestacks used to mean that business was good, the existence of garbage shows that life is present. Even as we discover beneficial uses for waste—for example, as ‘‘food’’ for other processes—that does not change the fundamental fact that we cannot function without making some waste.∞ On the other hand, we want to be rid of trash because it is messy and because some of its components are hazardous to human health and to other living organisms. Granted, we often store unwanted items that are not quite trash yet. Everyone’s basement, attic, or closets hold items that 2 Garbage In, Garbage Out Everyone’s basement, attic, or closets hold items that are in limbo. (∫ Zits Partnership. King Features Syndicate) are in limbo, especially formerly valuable items, like used electronics, that we might reuse or recycle. Eventually we find a repository even for long-stored items, by consigning them to a yard sale, garbage can, recycling bin, or compost heap. As one trash hauler summed things up, ‘‘Everything is trash.’’ By this he meant that all materials and all living things, no matter how valuable, eventually die, deteriorate, or become obsolete. And then they must be removed to somewhere else where they can be buried, burned, reused, or recycled.≤ This same incongruity runs through policy debates on whether to regulate the interstate transport of trash: Is trash to be regarded first and foremost as something of value? Or, alternatively, as pollution? To waste management firms and to the many communities that host and reap tax benefits from waste facilities, trash is valuable commerce. The Supreme Court has reinforced in several decisions its view that trash transport is commerce and that, therefore, states may not impede the interstate movement of trash unless Congress allows them to do so. However, even if garbage is commerce in the Supreme Court’s eyes, it is also pollution. Although modern waste facilities must meet much more stringent health and environmental standards than the town dumps they replaced, they are still sources of air and water contaminants . In the United States, landfills are the largest source of humangenerated methane—a powerful greenhouse gas—and carcinogens like benzene and vinyl chloride are among the exotic cocktail of trace gases that emanate from them. Landfill leachate often contains toxic compounds , and despite elaborate modern precautionary measures which Introduction 3 include soil covers, synthetic liners, and leachate collection systems, landfills can contaminate groundwater or nearby surface waters. In fact, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that all landfills will eventually leak liquids into the surrounding environment . Municipal waste incinerators, sometimes erroneously thought to be an alternative to landfills, transform trash into heat and ash, and create an air pollution stream that contains harmful compounds like fine particulate matter, mercury, dioxin, and nitrogen oxides, that must be controlled as directed by national and state regulations. Incinerator ash from the burning of municipal solid waste must be reused or sent to a landfill.≥ Trash’s paradoxical status as both pollution and commerce is thrown into relief when we examine the issue of long-distance transport within the United States. Garbage has long been trucked, barged, and moved by rail across state lines, but such interstate movement has increased noticeably in the past fifteen years. In 2005, 25 percent of disposed or incinerated municipal solid waste, or MSW (the technical term for trash), traveled to another state, which represents an increase of 147 percent in ten years.∂ This increase is due in part to stricter environmental regulations that have caused many old, local landfills to shut down. So the dramatic increase in commercial trash transport, created in part by new environmental rules, has in turn sparked criticisms on the environmental grounds that more communities are not only dumping their trash in someone...