0.cached.png
By Newsweek Editors
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
SOMETIME IN THE 23D century, a miraculous piece of technology will save us from ourselves. That's the predicted advent of the replicator, a device that breaks down garbage into molecules and energy and converts them into usable stuff--a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a pair of Air Jordans, a spare flip phone. This is the future of garbage according to the late Gene Roddenberry, the "Star Trek" visionary who thought that humans should be freed from irritating decisions like figuring out whether a polystyrene-foam food tray counts as recyclable plastic or regular trash.
The replicator is a great idea; unfortunately, it's a long way off. In the meantime, some garbage experts are forecasting that we'll be stuck with more or less the same methods of dealing with household refuse: landfilling most of it, recycling, composting and incinerating the rest. These methods will get more sophisticated over time. It's now possible, for example, to make recycled plastics purer by breaking down the original polymers chemically instead of just shredding and melting the stuff. But the current debate about garbage has more to do with mindset than technique.
In the short term, landfills will probably continue to get most of our trash, largely because they're cheap. Though cost comparisons are sharply contested, one estimates that in the United States it costs on average about $85 a ton to bury trash, compared with $60 to $80 a ton to burn it for energy and $100 to $150 a ton to recycle it. Keeping things affordable is important for cities with limited taxpayer dollars, and proponents of landfills say that they're environmentally safer and more cost effective than ever.
Read More on News
Reid Lifset of Yale's Program on Solid Waste Policy predicts that in the future manufacturers will play a bigger role in cleaning up their products once they're thrown out. Imagine Gateway 2000's taking back obsolete computers in a company-run exchange program. As it is, recycling is rising, now up to 27 percent, surpassing the EPA's first national goal set by J. Winston Porter in 1988. Porter, now a waste-management consultant, thinks recycling will peak at about a third of all trash. Beyond that, he says, the practice treads into questionable economic territory. "Why spend 10 times its value recycling something like hot-dog wrappers that's just taking up a little bit of space in a landfill?"
Porter's way of thinking riles Bill Sheehan, chair of the GrassRoots Recycling Network. Besides challenging industry claims that landfills are safe, Sheehan says it's high time Americans started considering an alternative: zero waste. The idea is that today's entire discard stream, all 208 million tons of it annually, can be reused, recycled or composted, leaving nothing for the landfills. Dan Knapp, a zero-waste consultant and president of a reuse business in Berkeley, Calif., puts it this way: "We view garbage as a manufactured product. When a garbage truck smashes your trash together, that's the first step in creating the chaos that ends up in a landfill." Knapp says that it's possible instead to clean and sort trash into 12 big categories, including chemicals, plastics, wood, metal and putrescibles ("anything that smells bad and rots"). Facilities would then process these materials and turn them into raw goods for industry.
Some bystanders think "zero waste" is more rallying cry than blueprint for the future. Not, however, the waste managers in Canberra, Australia. The capital territory plans to replace its two landfills with resource-recovery industrial parks by the year 2010. Starting in 1995, the government surveyed its 820,000 residents to find out what they wanted done with waste. "The message came across very clearly that they didn't want us to have any," says Graham Mannall, waste-reduction manager for Canberra. Mannall admits that many "tricky bits" remain unresolved, like what to do with batteries and chemicals. Still, Canberra is charging ahead. If the plan works, these parks will do for Canberra what Roddenberry's replicators did for the starship Enterprise.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines