Land, as the familiar truism reminds us, is one thing neither God nor man is making any more of. Garbage, on the other hand, is something we are constantly making more of. And the environmental and economic details of waste management, as reported last week by Mike Owen, can get pretty complicated.
Recycling is the best way to make the word “waste” a less significant part of the equation: Anything reused isn’t wasted. But for the most part, our means of dealing with the virtually incalculable tonnage of refuse a developed and affluent consumer culture like ours generates is to hide it away in more and bigger and costlier garbage graveyards. “We put men on the moon back in the 1960s,” said Columbus Recycling and Sustainability Center manager Carl Nunley. “Now, 50 years later, we’re still burying garbage like the cavemen.”
Too much of it, for sure. But not all of it. As reported in Owen’s story, the center collected 1,500 tons of recyclables just in April; that’s 1,500 tons that won’t reduce the capacity or the useful life of the Pine Grove Landfill. That’s a volume of recyclable material in one month that equals about three-quarters of what the city processed in a whole year before the new recycling center went online.
The system does not pay for itself, at least not in direct dollars and cents. Public Works Director Pat Biegler said the fluctuating market for recycled metal, paper and plastic currently pays the city about $550,000 a year, which offsets only about half the operating cost.
But aside from the intangible — or at least hard to quantify — environmental value, there are very tangible and very quantifiable benefits like extending the life of the landfill by putting less and less reusable stuff into it. Biegler said the landfill’s anticipated timeline of 27 years was already shrinking due to increased volume five years ago; now recycling and improved technology have increased it, and in a best-case scenario could almost double it.
Closing one landfill costs a lot of money; finding, buying and preparing the site for another landfill piles on millions more. Or the city could ship its garbage elsewhere and pay somebody else a hefty price to deal with it.
Garbage isn’t a subject people usually get excited about (except, in Columbus, when the issue is when and how often it gets picked up). But cost, sustainability and quality of life matter to everybody. And there’s still not any new land popping up around the planet.
To read the full story, visit http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/opinion/article84458472.html.