Waste unmanageable

The face of Calgary's Sheppard Landfill

Waste is fresh on my mind. I find it quite upsetting when I’m fretting over whether to reuse or recycle my yogurt container, while corporations are throwing away truckloads of cardboard because they can justify the cost. The urgency is lost on them, deep in the depths of the corporate beast, under accounting, budgets, absolved costs and so on.

I am a bipolar disposer. Filled with a call of action to improve the system some days, other times I find I am helpless, dragged in the undertow of an un-improving system.
Calgary has highest per capita disposal rates in North America. Our streets may be clean but our landfills are swollen, growing fat in the abundance of space we’ve been graced with. Prairies create a disparity, downplaying the necessity of reduction because of an amplitude of open spaces to burry our waste.
We are rich, and our wealth is wasted as we replace our resources on the daily, throwing away lightly used goods, because they’re no longer good enough. We stuff our black bins with the sins of dissatisfaction.

If I could call to action the masses, I’d ask the disease to be treated at the source. Recycling is a band aid we’ve laid on top of an open sore. It is a last resort to a mass grave, downgrading from one product to another, just one more step in a staircase leading to that grave. (turning a milk jug into a plastic toy which can’t be recycled and eventually ends up in the garbage…)

Two R’s come before the third; Reduce and reuse are the tools we can use. Stemming the flow of what goes to the landfill is the best way to make a serious impact. Decreasing packaging, buying bulk goods where you can bring your own container, bringing your own bags, your own mug, your own water bottle, wherever you go. Not being bought by convenience and impulse. Making a conscious effort to go plastic free.
There are so many things we can do to minimize the impact on our waste streams.

Soon there will be compost in Calgary, about time. We are the last major municipality in Canada to implement a city wide composting program (for shame). It can’t come soon enough, because there has been an insurgence of ‘plant-ware’ ‘bioplastic’ ‘compostable food ware’ products on the market. These are good if there’s a place to industrial-compost them, but if they’re thrown in the garbage, it can do more harm than good.

Landfills are designed to store garbage. They are not designed for decomposition. They minimize light, oxygen and moisture from getting in. For inert products like plastics and metal, they will remain for centuries unchanged. For organic materials like yard and food waste and compostable items, they will mainly be preserved (40 year old bags of grass and coloured newspapers have been excavated, preserved in original condition) but sometimes anaerobic decomposition can occur, producing methane and a nasty leachate (garbage juice). Modern landfills have methane capturing systems in an attempt to harness the gas for energy, but a lot can escape, bad news for climate change. Methane is a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It’s also highly flammable, increasing risks of garbage fires.

The bottom line? We need to stop reaching for the low hanging fruit. Recycling can help minimize items ending up in the landfill (for now) and the need for virgin materials, but it is not a viable antidote for our waste addiction. Also, greenwashing is all around us. We can’t be satisfied with buying compostable items without the infrastructure to accommodate them, because incomplete systems are not sustainable.

 Conquering the beast of waste is bigger than all of us. It’s an insatiable being fed by marketing, capitalism, modern society and hundreds of other factors. It’s a hopeless tangle that will take decade to unravel into something manageable.

I guess today is one of the bipolar days where I am stuck in the undertow. I hope tomorrow I can rise.