AMERICA: LAND OF WASTE

The average American tosses 4.4 pounds of trash every single day. It may not seem all that astonishing on the surface, but with 323.7 million people living in the United States, that is roughly 728,000 tons of daily garbage – enough to fill 63,000 garbage trucks.

That is 22 billion plastic bottles every year. Enough office paper to construct a 12-foot-high wall from Los Angeles to Manhattan. It is 300 laps around the equator in paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons. It is 500 disposable cups per average American worker – cups that will still be sitting in the landfill five centuries from now.

Approximately half of the 254 million tons of yearly waste will meet its fate in one of the more than 2,000 active landfills across the country – and you probably live, work or socialize closer to one than you may think.

The easiest way to know you’re living near a landfill is by smelling it, right? Wrong.

The United States is home to thousands of inactive landfills – and some have found new life and purpose as public parks.

But most are out of sight, out of mind. The West Coast is practically overflowing with landfills: There are a dozen in the Los Angeles area alone, though most are now closed. New Yorkers hailing from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens have no problem beating up on Staten Island, a borough practically built on top of what used to be the world’s largest garbage dump.

Even the Sunshine State isn’t immune to taking some of the load. Landfills linger in the heart of Miami and West Palm Beach, though they pale in comparison to the dump deluge in Tennessee and the Carolinas.

Landfills have a long and relatively unsorted history. Before the first municipal dumps appeared on the map in the 20th century, humans either burned their garbage or buried it on the outskirts of town to avoid disease. The circa 1937 Fresno Municipal Sanitary Landfill is considered the first modern, sanitary landfill of its kind, and future landfills followed suit.

At first, they weren’t much more than man-made craters in the earth – a dramatic step up from the first municipal dump established in ancient Athens but still pretty crude. They were environmental disasters, leaching contaminated liquid into the soil and groundwater, and releasing overwhelming amounts of methane into the air.

The 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act changed all of that. The law requires landfills to be lined with plastic, clay or both, effectively killing the old idea of a “dump,” or those old-school craters.

Over the last hundred years, the number of dumps and landfills has dramatically increased across the country – as seen in the time lapse above – to accommodate the growing population’s garbage disposal needs.

Las Vegas may be the city of sin, but its home state Nevada is the land of garbage, with a whopping 38.4 tons of waste per person in its landfills.

Idaho, North Dakota, and Connecticut are the only three states in the country with less than 10 tons of landfill waste per person – putting Pennsylvania, Colorado, and California to shame, with their average of 35 tons of landfill garbage per person.

That’s not to say that these state residents are necessarily producing all of this landfill waste themselves. The trash trade is a $4 billion industry, and many state landfills are only too happy to take garbage from other states.

Transport fees are cheapest in the South and Midwest – as low as $19 per ton in states like Alabama. Ohio, for example, is famous for accepting as much as 3.4 million tons of out-of-state waste per year, to the tune of $35 per ton. The most offensive giver of trash was New York, accounting for nearly 32 percent of Ohio’s out-of-state total, with New Jersey not far behind.

Landfill gas is a dangerous, virtually invisible concoction generated in the most natural way possible: the bacterial decomposition of organic material. The result is half methane and half carbon dioxide and water vapor, with trace amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and nonmethane organic compounds, or NMOCs, which can cause smog if uncontrolled.

In the past, environmentalists have been more concerned by carbon dioxide emissions, but now, they are worrying about methane. Even though methane doesn’t linger as long as carbon dioxide, it is far more effective at absorbing the sun’s heat and contributing to global warming. For the first 20 years after it meets the atmosphere, methane is 84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The population-heavy states of California and Texas are currently facing the greatest problem with landfill-produced methane, but the repercussions of this problem could eventually affect the entire world.

It can be hard to wrap our minds around the impact of our waste in terms of landfill gas and metrics that stretch into the billions. So let’s scale it down.

Your 4.4 pounds of daily trash is approximately the weight of a modest-sized pumpkin that you would carve on Halloween. Add up all those “pumpkins” over the seasons and they come in at 1,606 pounds – or the size of your average cow. But if you pack that trash into cubed feet, you’re looking at the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The waste tally for a family of four is even grimmer. That yearly haul weighs as much as an Asian elephant and stacks up to the height of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Think that’s bad? The annual weight of trash for the entire country equals 254 million tons, or 1.2 million blue whales, and would reach the moon and back 25 times, a journey of 11,534,090 miles.

Not all hope is lost, though. Keep reading to learn about how you can cut back on your waste. 

Now, more than ever, Americans are hopping on the recycling bandwagon. Last year marked the all-time high for recycling: 34.3 percent of our garbage, or 87.2 million tons, could have ended up in a landfill but didn’t. Bravo, America!

But though recycling has increased in recent years, so has trash generation. More than 60 million plastic bottles still find their way to landfills and incinerators on a daily basis. Six times as many water bottles were thrown away in 2004 than in 1997.

Clearly, there is still work to be done. And you can make a difference.

Conclusion

Whether we are a running out of landfill space in America is a hotly debated topic, but that doesn’t mean we should produce garbage like there is no tomorrow. Here are some tips to help reduce your personal waste:

• Bring reusable bags when you go shopping, and choose reusable containers for packing meals.
• Buy in bulk whenever possible. Beware of double packing – or individually wrapped items that are repackaged and sold as bulk.
• Compost your food scraps and yard waste whenever possible.
• Cut back on junk mail – you receive more than 30 pounds of it per year.
• Be like a SNOWFLAKE and try and leave as little of an environmental footprint as you can.

https://www.saveonenergy.com/land-of-waste/

SUPPORT FOR TRUMP

LETTER: Trump-bashing doesn’t heal wounds that divide us
https://www.capecodtimes.com/opinion/20200520/letter-trump-bashing-doesnt-heal-wounds-that-divide-us

Gary Liddell of Holt writes: “The president is bringing in and testing new vaccines for this virus at unbelievable speed but yet, the Dems continue to complain and criticize that he is not taking the blame. Of course he shouldn’t; it’s all on the Chinese.”
https://www.nwfdailynews.com/opinion/20200327/letter-too-much-trump-bashing

The continual President Trump-bashing is getting out of hand.
Could we not give Trump some “credit” for this instead of trying to find ways to tear him down?
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article188262129.html

Let’s stop the Donald Trump bashing. Here is an individual running for president who speaks his mind.
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article48936355.html

Readers React: Stop bashing Trump during this crisis
I just finished reading the Letters to the Editor in the March 29 edition. Here is a summary of the letters. I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump and finally I hate Trump.
Really people! At a time when our country is going through tough times and we should be pulling together as Americans, this is the drivel that keeps showing up in The Morning Call Letters to the Editor? Aren’t we better than that?
https://www.mcall.com/opinion/readers-react/mc-opi-let-knerr-i-hate-trump-letters-20200402-h2cyqzuugvabjk3qq6ik2afhy4-story.html

Stop bashing President Trump, he's getting this done
https://www.galvnews.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/article_f10706c1-bf15-5de8-a7c4-6b5da197ce28.html

In a time of crisis, U.S. should rally around Trump, not bash him | READER COMMENTARY
I didn’t vote for Donald Trump nor am I a fan. But Trump-bashing has gone too far!
https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/readers-respond/bs-ed-rr-trump-bashing-letter-20200409-hjmnur5lxjgqthrdpz4gjupagu-story.html

Coronavirus Disinformation is Winning Hearts and Minds

Reuters is reporting that a new poll indicates that about a quarter of Americans have no interest in taking a Covid-19 vaccine if one is developed. Some people are concerned that safety could be compromised in view of the speed of development. Reuters writes:

"(Reuters) - A quarter of Americans have little or no interest in taking a coronavirus vaccine, a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Thursday found, with some voicing concern that the record pace at which vaccine candidates are being developed could compromise safety. 

Some 36% of respondents said they would be less willing to take a vaccine if U.S. President Donald Trump said it was safe, compared with only 14% who would be more interested. 

Less than two-thirds of respondents said they were “very” or “somewhat” interested in a vaccine, a figure some health experts expected would be higher given the heightened awareness of COVID-19 and the more than 92,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the United States alone. 

Fourteen percent of respondents said they were not at all interested in taking a vaccine, and 10% said they were not very interested. Another 11% were unsure. 

Studies are underway, but experts estimate that at least 70% of Americans would need to be immune through a vaccine or prior infection to achieve what is known as “herd immunity,” when enough people are resistant to an infectious disease to prevent its spread."

It is shocking that about 36% of people in the survey would be less inclined to do what the president says, while 14% would be inclined to believe him. That reflects the president's obvious track record of lies, deceit and gross incompetence in dealing with the pandemic. One can see the damage that lies and disinformation from all sources is inflicting on Americans and American society.

On the encouraging side, about 84% of respondents in the survey still believe that vaccines are safe for adults and children. That suggests safety assurances that people get might reconsider their unwillingness to take a vaccine. About 29% of those who said they were “not very” interested in taking the vaccine indicated that they would be more open to taking a vaccine if the FDA approved it. Presumably, the FDA will approve the vaccine before it is made available to the public.

Chapter Review: Introductory

CONTEXT

Introductory is Chapter 1 of Thorstein Veblen’s influential 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. It is a mere 9 pages long in the version of the book I bought that Compass Circle published on May 7, 2020. Although Veblen, an American living in Minnesota, is considered to be an economist, his take on it is from a psychological and sociological point of view. In this regard, he predates the rise of the new disciplines of behavioral economics and behavioral finance by about 110 years. Those new disciplines try to model messy humans beings as they really behave in the real world, not as some mythical rational creature in some mythical market.

Introductory reads much like a sociology text. For me, Introductory is distinctly reminiscent of Peter Berger's 1963 masterpiece, Introduction to Sociology (reviewed here). From what I understand of modern cognitive and social science, his take on the human condition is amazingly accurate, at least in the first 9 pages. Maybe modern science has debunked at least some of what he believed or postulated, but from what I know, Veblen probably seems to have gotten things surprisingly right.

The Theory of the Leisure Class presents a devastating criticism of the super wealthy class he observed in the late 1800s. Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to highlight the psychological and sociological aspects of how people like John D. Rockefeller lived their super wealthy lives. In his view, the super wealthy were modern equivalents of primitive tribal chiefs.

The book is short, 170 pages in my version, but it is not easy (for me) to read. Veblen's prose is ponderous and convoluted. I had to read some passages four or five times before what he was saying became clear. For people comfortable with this sort of dense writing, the book will probably be a breeze to get through. But for others, this will be a slog.

Chapter review

Veblen starts by asserting that barbarian cultures of feudal Europe and feudal Japan were marked by rigid class distinctions in the kinds of work or activities that people engaged in. Engaging in warfare and priestly activities were honorable and reserved for the elites or the leisure class. The more mundane and less honorable or even dishonorable work was for the inferior classes. Servants of the elites were often held in higher esteem than most other occupations. In this view, one can see class differences and how society valued people based on what they did. This was not necessarily a meritocracy. Titles and positions were often hereditary.

In earlier stages of barbarism, Veblen asserts that the leisure class was sometimes less differentiated in situations where each individual have more impact on people’s lives. The inferior classes generally constituted slaves, manual laborers, women and dependents, presumably mostly children. Upper class men were often proscribed by custom or social norm from engaging in manual labor or industry. That attitude lasted through the 1800s and 1900s. It still exists to a non-trivial extent today. Veblen comments on the rise of the leisure class as he saw it:

“The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of communities at a low stage of development indicates that the institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions apparently necessary to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the hunting of large game or both); that is to say, the men, who constitute the inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be habituated to the infliction of injury by force and stratagem; (2) subsistence must be obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a routine of labour. The institution of leisure class is the outgrowth of an early discrimination between employments, according to which some employments are worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient distinction the worthy employments are those which may be classed as exploit; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no appreciable element of exploit enters. 

But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only, and it seldom results in the subversion of entire suppression of a standpoint once accepted. A distinction is still habitually made between industrial and non-industrial occupations; and this modern distinction is a transmuted form of the barbarian distinction between exploit and drudgery. Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and public merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the material means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same as it was in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has not fallen into disuse.”

A couple of observations on that come to mind. First, Veblen apparently considered his time to to be a period of consistently warlike barbarism. That barbarism significantly retained the ancient distinctions about honorable vs dishonorable work and the corresponding attitudes toward the people in those occupations.

Second, although Veblen refers to earlier cultures as ‘peaceable’ and modern cultures as ‘consistently warlike’, peaceable does not mean non-violent. He takes pains to point out that the evidence available to him in 1899 indicated that human cultures were always violent and brutal. By consistently warlike, Veblen argues that the modern warlike situation arises once society has progressed to to point where society passes from primitive ‘peaceable savagery’ to ‘a predatory phase of life’ dominated by exploitation of people and groups both inside and outside the culture. In this, he seems to be at least somewhat equating warlike with predatory or exploitative:

“When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory phase of life, the conditions of emulation change. The opportunity and the incentive to emulate increase greatly in scope and urgency. The activity of the men more and more takes on the character of exploit; and an invidious comparison of one hunter or warrior with another grows continually easier and more habitual. Tangible evidences of prowess -- trophies -- find a place in men's habits of thought as an essential feature of the paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of the chase or of the raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent force. Aggression becomes the accredited form of action, and booty serves as prima facie evidence of successful aggression. 

Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the taking of life -- the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute or human -- is honourable in the highest degree. And this high office of slaughter, as an expression of the slayer's prepotence, casts a glamour of worth over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them, even in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields, becomes a honorific employment. At the same time, employment in industry becomes correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense apprehension, the handling of the tools and implements of industry falls beneath the dignity of able-bodied men. Labour becomes irksome.”

On Veblen’s view, what elevates society from peaceable savagery to the modern barbaric predatory phase is acquisition of technical knowledge and industrialization. Material circumstances change and sufficient wealth is created by industrialization that it makes endless predation and war worth the cost. In other words, when there is enough to fight over, humans will fight over it. Assuming that correctly states the argument, it is an interesting observation to say the least. Is that still a dominant cultural norm in today?

In Chapter 1, a person can see important but unpleasant aspects of Western society in 2020 that Veblen saw in 1899. At least that what it looks like to this novice.

For people who are interested, some or all of the book is available for free online. The copyright expired. Chapter 1 is here.