Plastic in Landfills - What to Do?
My pen was running out of ink while I was writing and I don’t want to throw it away. I think I’ll look up where to buy ink pen refills.
And it made me think of how much plastic there is in the world and in landfills.
Plastic is a big business. They make new products without thinking about the future repercussions. I can drive myself crazy thinking of all that. Going into any store, I just see garbage. Everything that we own or use right now, will end up in a landfill someday.
How crazy is that?
Everything in Walmart and Target = landfill.
Unless… we recycle and have the means to recycle in our communities.
In my area, there isn’t an option to recycle unless I take it to a recycling center. Not everyone has the means to do that. But recycling is so important.
ALUMINUM
Aluminum is a valuable metal that can be recycled easily. They melt it down and make it into new cans (though there are environmental impacts of the recycling process also). If we throw cans away, they sit in a landfill, rust and corrode. In areas where they don’t line the landfill, when it rains and the water infiltrates through the landfill, the corroded metal eventually leaches into the groundwater.
Some states pay to get cans back (Oregon and Michigan for example) as an incentive to keep this valuable metal out of landfills and to keep people recycling.
PLASTIC
Plastic is a whole other story. Plastic has only been around for about 100 years and yet it takes 450 years to decompose. It got its start during WWII making hard plastic covers for fighter jets.
Since it’s only been 80 years since then, we haven’t even seen the impact of what all this plastic is doing to our land, not to mention the impact of the factories that create plastic products are.
One good thing about plastic in landfills is it can be compacted, unlike cans.
But plastic is a lot harder to recycle. There are so many kinds (think 1-7), and some areas only take certain kinds.
Then plastic bags are worse. They take up to 1000 years to decompose in a landfill. And since plastic is made out of petroleum, it doesn’t actually decompose, it just breaks down into smaller pieces. San Fransisco banned plastic bags from grocery stores and many more communities are doing the same.
But, of course there is push back from plastic companies to stop bans on plastic bags, and that’s why it’s a slow fight.
It’s kind of ridiculous that we put our garbage into plastic bags too.
I get it, it’s easy and if you have a mess, it won’t leak. Why aren’t there paper garbage bags you can purchase for your home garbage collection? For my home garbage collection, I use paper bags from grocery stores.
But even those seem hard to get. At grocery stores, they don’t even ask you if you want paper or plastic. It’s automatically plastic.
PAPER
Cardboard and paper products decompose faster (2-6 weeks) but it takes up so much space in landfills that it takes up about 15% of landfill space which could be easily recycled.
So what can we do about the garbage in the world?
CONSUME LESS
The biggest thing to do is to consume less of all these products. Refill water bottles or get a growler from a local bar rather than purchasing individually bottled beverage products.
Getting take out? Ask for no plastic silverware.
RESEARCH
See what is recyclable in your area. Got here to check: https://how2recycle.info/check-locally or do an online search for “recycling services [your city/county state].
Start to collect it and drop it off or request a recycling container if it’s available.
If something is not recyclable, stop buying that product and ask you city/county why it isn’t.
MAKE CHANGE
Talk to your legislatives who can make those changes in your community.
Remind people to recycle.
Recycle in front of your friends and remind them to do the same. People copy other people, if you start the trend others will catch on.