Road of No Return

Yesterday I heard someone reminisce about days long ago when as a child he had the responsibility to take out the trash and burn it. I remember that at my Grandpa's home they always burned their trash as well. It made be wonder what happened to the idea. I know, we have to 'save the environment' and all that so we don't put all those pollutants into the air. No, we just put them into the ground. And I suppose that if everyone in the city was burning their trash there would be a constant smoke rising from the cities. But wait, there IS a constant smoke rising from the cities. So we don't get rid of the trash and we have a constant supply of air pollution both. That doesn't seem fair.

Today we have more garbage per household than we have ever had in the history of the world. Nearly everything you can buy today comes in a package that is not only practically impenetrable but it has a decay time that cannot even be calculated! Besides the packaging, most products themselves were designed to become obsolete or break within a predetermined time so that you would throw it out and buy the newest model. From computers to flashlights to tires to digital cameras, we are living in a throw-away world. Unfortunately, burning the trash is no longer an option. In my Grandfather's day, they burned things like cardboard and paper. They kept things like glass and metal because they reused them and they were expensive and hard to come by. They were also not made of things like titanium. Their tools, implements and appliances were built to last and people generally repaired things that broke. Now, if the computer chip dies in your stove, dishwasher or car you throw the whole thing out and get a new one.

It isn't really that I want to go back to the day when things were harder for people but I do think that industry and manufacturing are doing us a great disservice by creating more and more products that we don't need, that are packaged far too heavily, have a decay time of a million years and are built on the principle of planned obsolescence. Thanks to the amazing inventions of super-plastics and other packaging materials, we cannot burn our trash without polluting the air with highly toxic chemicals. The result is a tremendous pile of garbage that will never go away. We can sell it, bury it, ship it overseas, or even recycle it, but it will not return to the dust for many hundreds of years hence.

Perhaps in the future they will remove all the people from an island, say Australia or something, and haul all of the trash that cannot be burned down there. It's not a good idea but what choice to we have? We either bury it in our own back yard where it pollutes the ground water, or we bury it in someone else's back yard or we burn it and breathe the toxic fumes for a while. But as I said earlier, we are still breathing the fumes, from something. Once again, it doesn't seem fair. The sad thing is that the same manufacturing companies that are producing the toxic packaging that cannot be burned, are polluting the air with toxic chemicals while producing more toxic chemicals. Ironic, yes. Funny, no.

So, what's the answer? I'm not sure, but I know that although we haven't yet sunk Australia with our garbage, if we don't change something we will be well on our way to having a garbage planet like the one in “Wall-e”. Although it was slightly exaggerated, it is still a dreary prospect. The road of toxic, not to mention radioactive waste is a road of no return. If the engineer cannot see the danger and step on the brakes, then maybe the people in the train ought to step up and pull the emergency chord. It may be too late. And then again, it may be just in time.