Trash sucks. Four options.

Trash sucks. Trash is something that is unusable and is an indication of an inefficiency.


Yes. It is inefficient for a manufacturing process to create substandard products that don't make it to market and end up as waste. It is inefficient to throw away food products that have rotted or are undesirable. E-waste - all of our old electronics that are either broken or outdated - an inefficient use of materials.

Still, trash happens. Not all of it has to sit in a landfill, though. We've gone through the four Rs before. Reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose.

Let's review reuse and recycle, then look at two other ways of dealing with trash.

1.Creative reuse, or just plain reuse. Denim scraps (an inefficiency in the process of making jeans) can be used to create insulation.

2. Recycling. We're familiar with this - glass, plastic, metal, paper. There's a lot of energy that goes into recycling - sorting, hipping recyclables all over the place, then processing the post-consumer goods into a usable raw material for manufacturers. Then, of course, re-manufacturing that material into something that's hopefully really effing useful. And something that can be re-recycled, if needed.

3. Compost. Organics have this neat element called carbon. Ooooh. Carbon. It means that it can decompose and turn into fertilizer. And we need that to grow stuff. Way better for our planet than using nitrogen based fertilizers. Yay! Industrial composters can take all sorts of things, like waxy cardboard, used pizza boxes, bones, shellfish parts... But there's a big NIMBY issue with the collection, transport and processing (composting). Augh. That sucks.

4. Burn the shit. Yep. W2E, waste-to-energy. Burn trash and make heat. But, what about all the pollutants that are formed from burning the shit that should have been recycled (like plastics)? I mean, styrofoam burns super hot (a W2E'er called it "jet fuel"), but do you want that in your air? Fuck no. But... is it worse than the by-products of coal fired power plants? This article says that W2E is better than coal (check pg 3 for a graphy-graph)... and on-par with natural gas to create heat (not electricity). I don't love it, but I think it's better than having it sit in a landfill, releasing methane gas (sucks more than carbon dioxide, from a GHG perspective... and yeah, it can be captured and recovered from landfills, but it is not always done).

Thoughts?