The Way We Was

When I rub elbows with the swells here in Metrowest and they ask me what I do, I respond that I am a “recycling engineer.” I used to say “sanitation engineer” but, when my back was turned, I often heard their derisive remarks … one of which invariably was “dumpfuck.” So I quickly learned that “recycling” was good and “sanitation” was bad. Now I can hold my head up whilst nibbling a cream cheese and watercress sandwich because I am now environmentally and appellatively correct. But the sweet irony of the matter is that the way we used to dispose of trash was considerably cheaper and certainly even friendlier to our cherished environment.

Twenty-five years ago most of the trash at our town’s dump was incinerated. The heat generated from this burning was used to produce steam to heat the High School, Junior High School, and eight of the nine grammar schools in town. AND the town had only two garbage trucks that collected the town’s trash on a rotating schedule that was fast, clean and efficient (if a little noisy). But, because of the protestations of a handful of tree huggers, this was edicted to be fiscally wasteful and dangerous to our environment. However, it doesn’t take Einstein to realize that two garbage trucks traveling around town for five days a week use about 1/10 of the gasoline that are consumed from every household in town sending an SUV to the recycling center on average 1.3 times a week.

To this fossil fuel squandering one must also add fiscal imprudence. We here at the dump (recycling center) recently spent five million dollars to install huge trash compactors and to destroy the old incinerator. Also, the cost of the “tipping fees” the town pays to send its trash to landfills around the state is now about twenty times what we used to pay to burry the ashes from our town’s incinerator. Add to this the fact that landfills are becoming fewer and further between. It is forecast that, by the year 2020, there will be no more land available for this “environmentally friendly” purpose. At this point tipping fees will be so prohibitive that another alternative will have to be found.

Now, environmentalists will argue that the segregation of trash into newspaper, cardboard, green glass, brown glass, clear glass, plastic, aluminum, etc. removes considerable bulk from the amount of trash actually tipped. However, there are two problems with this approach. First, because of the metastasis of this illogic, the amount of recycled material now far exceeds that which can be processed by the existing recycling centers. And that which is recycled no longer reaps the financial benefit to our town that it once did. In fact, some recycling centers now charge us to drop off newspaper, cardboard, green glass, etc. The second problem with this approach is that, because of the surfeit of recyclables, about half of such material that we get here at the dump is in fact serendipitously mixed with our unrecycled trash and sent to landfills anyway. (And think of all the wasted effort that all those tree-humping do-gooders around our “swell” town perform!)

One other unthought-through rationalism had been give by the environmentaltists to deep-six our old reliable incinerators. The effluents (from this burning of garbage), notably soot and carbon dioxide, were a clear and present danger to our state’s citizens. (This was before the “global warming” mania.) But, as it turns out, the fast growing legacy of noxious gases (methane, ethylene, etc.) vented from the vast acreage of landfills that this policy has created now threatens to match those savings which came from scrapping our incinerators. And, within a few short years, this annuity of miasma will clearly far surpass that which we thought we had eliminated. (Beware of unintended consequences!)

I do have a obvious solution for all this environmental loopyness … bring back the incinerators and trash pickup! The Big Cheese disagrees. He has gotten used to the kickbacks on the big tipping fees and from the recyclers.