by Meena Janekrabuanhad
Environmental Impacts of Landfills
“If undeveloped countries consumed at the same rate as the U.S., four complete planets the size of the Earth would be required (Scientific American 2012).” Even though, “Americans constitute 5% of the world's population, [we] consume 24% of the world's energy (Scientific American 2012). Because of our higher standards of living and overconsumption trend, we create half of the globe’s solid waste. While the landfill, itself, is an environmental problem because of the methane it releases, which is 21x more powerful than carbon dioxide, hastening global warming, it also causes a lot of pollution. It pollutes the local environment through air and it contaminates the groundwater, aquifers, and soil. This, though is not the main issue we are trying to address. Yes, better technologies can be implemented, better landfills can be made but this is solving the problem after it has occurred. The simple problem and the simple solution is just that we are producing too much waste and need to consume less.
Midway Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean between China and the United States, have become a dumping ground for all the trash swept from the ocean that came from various places, through littering, through animals digging in trash causing them to fly away, etc. On the beach, there are so much trash people can’t even fathom, from mannequin heads to flip-flops, umbrella handles, you name it, it’s probably there. No one lives there but all this trash was washed up from the tide from us. While we are living in a beautiful, trash free home, the animals that inhabit that island are suffering as they are mistaking the washed up bottle caps and shiny pieces of plastic as food. Obviously when they eat it, the plastic does not break down in their stomachs and they just end up starving to death. A person was allowed to film at Midway and when they were trekking through the trash on the beach, they came across countless, dead, rotting birds; he cut one open right there and then and what you saw was 20-30 plastic bottle caps. They didn’t kill themselves; we did.
“8 million tons of plastic leak into the ocean annually, and it's getting worse every year. Americans are said to use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour (Walsh).” The problem we are facing now is not what to do with the plethora of trash but how to produce less of it. Our selfish, spending habits is resulting in countless lands becoming polluted and turning into landfills creating the numerous deaths in our ecosystem. We must be reminded that this Earth does not only belong to us and we must take care of it. Landfills are not a permanent solution, just one to avoid the problem. Liners, used in landfills, to help catch any toxins and chemicals from the materials breaking down only last 20 years; how much land do we have available left to waste? Landfills that are already in place are also packed so tightly the materials in it can’t degrade properly because there is not enough oxygen. Therefore, putting all the waste in landfills still doesn’t solve all our problems.
People have to start feeling connected to their trash and realizing the end path of their waste. Our society has always been based on consumerism to keep the economy going; everyone must spend, spend, spend but they’ll be no spending if we don’t have a planet to live on. Consumers need to think before they buy and know that their waste has an effect. There is more to their trash than it just getting picked up in front of your curb. From there, it has to go through a process where the trash gets sorted and dumped; it just doesn’t disappear like magic. When people start becoming educated on the process of how we deal with our waste and start caring about the environment, that is when change will start to occur.
Annotated Bibliography
Plastic island: How our trash is destroying paradise. (n.d.). Retrieved April 28, 2017, from
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/world/midway-plastic-island/
CNN was chosen as a reliable source because it is a news site that has been around and reported news for a long time. The article also had a video where you were able to actually see what they were writing about and hear what the locals there had to say.
Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment. (2012,
September 10). Retrieved April 28, 2017, from
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumption-habits/
Scientific American was chosen as a reliable source because it has been the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S. and has award-winning authoritative sources for science discoveries. The statistics given in this article also matched other articles.
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