everydaytrash

The good people of BioCycle magazine and the Earth Engineering Center of Columbia University have been tracking the ebb and flow of America’s municipal solid waste—as in all private and commercial trash that isn’t construction debris—since 1989.  Their recently released 2006 report (affectionately known as the SOG), reveals that overall Americans recycle about one-third of our waste and send nearly two-thirds to landfills.  Only seven percent is burned and less than one percent is burned for energy.

New York dropped from first to third on the list of states that export the most trash, following Jersey at number two and the surprising front-runner of Maryland.  Who knew?  Changes in the way in which exported trash was counted this time around contributed to some of this drop, the authors explain, as a couple million tons of construction debris was knocked off the Empire State’s tally.  Even so, as of 2004, New York remained the third most squeamish state when it comes to dealing with our own garbage.  Interestingly, our recycling rate is above the national average, though with states like Alabama sending nearly 90% of their trash to landfills, the bar wasn’t set all that high.

This concludes the dry numerical portion of the blog.  At least for the moment.

I threw away my journals last year. All of them. From the little girl diaries with locks and keys to the ferociously-filled marble notebooks of my college years. Mine was a many-volumed collection of angst and, in a moment of psychological cleansing and studio space-making, I decided I had been hauling around the emotional and physical baggage of those books for too long.

I nearly lost my resolve the next day when I came home to find the steps in front of my building littered with ripped out pages from the cloth-covered journals I favored in high school, the ones I filled all the way through on thick one-sided pages then flipped over and filled one-sided the other way. My stomach churned.

I’d like to think it was a bum who opened the trash can and, angry that my adolescence could not be redeemed for nickels, tore the pages from the journals and threw them on the ground before stomping away. I’d also like to think he or she did all of this without pausing to make out words from the scribbling and that none of my creepy neighbors had the foresight to pick up the pieces and invade my fifteen-year-old self by skimming a few lines.

It’s a romantic concept, garbology, to examine a culture by looking at what it throws away. Someone reading closely that night on West 104^th Street would have learned an enormous amount about the relationship, over time, between a young woman and her cloth-covered books.

  City officials in Honolulu are exchanging tips with European cruise ships on how to dump sewage without contaminating the beautiful waters of Hawaii.  Apparently islands and luxery liners have many of the same questions when it comes to trash. 

  One year later, much of New Orleans resembles a rubbish heap.

  This story from the PBS show NOW takes a look at the moving target of toxic waste and the links between trash, politics and terror.