Two worlds, is either ‘green’?
Wretchard’s recent post, Sewage Tsunami, describes the community and economy that evolves around third world dump sites.
Many years ago I actually lived for some months on a dump site…known as Smokey Mountain; and the infernal fires which arose from it night and day were caused by the spontaneous combustion of organic material underfoot. If anything resembled a terrestrial version of hell, it was Smokey Mountain at night with garbage trucks snaking up the hill amidst pillars of fire and smoke, attended by what seemed innumerable legions of imps. The site was featured in many documentaries which purported to show the horror of life in the Third World, but I can tell you, from first hand experience, that the denizens of Smokey Mountain considered themselves to be comparatively lucky. They had a guaranteed income.
Each square meter of Smokey Mountain was divided into territories. Whatever was dumped into those territories could be ripped out and sold — copper wire, glass bottles, waste paper, metal — and carved into the sides of this garbage mountain were processing sites where the glass was smashed and binned into baskets, tin cans were flattened and formed into bales, and copper wire was extracted from the interiors of motors or cables.
[…]
A tremendous amount of recycling was achieved in this way. What you have to understand is that the garbage which finally settled to the bottom of Smokey Mountain had been stripped of its last usable material. It was picked clean. Most of Manila’s cardboard, a considerable percentage of its glass bottles and quite a bit of its scrap metal came from the labor of thousands of scavengers. From a certain point of view it was the epitome of “appropriate technology”. It was almost fantastically “Green”. And come to think of it, it was mostly honest labor.
Indeed. I’m amazed at how people in the third world make useful what we in the first world discard as worn out or broken. What does eventually make it to the household rubbish bin in the developing world is then subjected to the iterative scavenging described in Wretchard’s post - first the street scavengers, then municipal garbage collectors, and then those who literally live off of the dump site.
Contrast that with American ’solid waste management practices’. Things worn out or broken get tossed in the trash. The regularly scheduled municipal collector pulls up in a giant truck and tips the bin. In most of America this is an unsorted collection of both waste and recyclables. It’s all wisked away in a very efficient manner and dumped in a 5-acre sarcophagus that is consists of several feet of compacted clay and an impermeable synthetic liner. The garbage is spread and compacted with heavy machinery and covered daily with soil to reduce vectors - rodents, birds, flies, etc. The routine goes on, layer after layer, until the landfill has reached it’s permitted capacity. A ‘cap’ is put in place, not so different than the liner on the bottom and sides. Most modern landfills also have a leachate collection system, a methan venting and/or collection system, and a ground water monitoring program. While they my ‘close’, meaning they don’t accept more garbage, they must be monitored for decades (perhaps centuries) into the future.
These are two vastly different treatments. They have evolved with entirely different communities and economies. Is one really more ‘green’ than the other? I’m not certain, but one is certainly dirtier.
GALLUP
