Bramblings: Garbage preparedness

By BECKY NELSON
We are running out of space for our garbage. I find this a horrifying and daunting. In just a matter of years, we may have very few places to send out trash for disposal. I understand the thought of incinerators is anathema to many, but I also wonder if the technology of such sites has improved to the point that the scrubbers remove more of the toxins that hit the air and make it a more viable alternative to landfills. We need to do something.

I was horrified when we were in New York City some decades ago for a wedding and were on a ship in the straits of New York at the mouth of the Hudson River when a huge barge covered with garbage chugged past our boat on its way to the ocean. My offhand question about where the garbage was going, thinking it was on its way to New Jersey or somewhere on land outside the city, resulted in the answer from a native that the garbage was just dumped out in the ocean. The practice didn’t end until sometime in the early ‘90s. This was in the early 1980s, so another decade of garbage went straight into the ocean before the practice was banned. The ocean was the dump for decades.

I remember when “the dump” was a weekly trip for us kids and we took our barrel full of waste, mostly cans and scraps and broken items, to the dump where we tipped the mess on top of another mess left by those that dumped before us. There were always rats at the dump, taking advantage of the goodness of our waste to nurture their own families. We lived near enough the Claremont dump so that when dumping became a thing of the past and landfills started to cover the waste, the rats invaded our home and farm looking for a place to perpetuate the species.

These rats were huge. They were scary and intimidating to look at, and they could decimate things left in storage and invade every building. We had such a war on rats that Dad set fox traps in the cellar to catch the biggest of the beasts. I recently read that many areas of the country in urban settings are fighting similar wars with rats because of garbage in the streets. They are invading their cars and are chewing the wires in vehicles, wreaking havoc and adding one more level of awfulness to the garbage dilemma. Garbage is a problem. We are a wasteful world with lots of unnecessary packaging. Our buying habits are ridiculous, packaging of products is over the top and we have too much of everything at any one moment in our lives. We create garbage at an alarming rate, and we need to find innovative solutions to cut back on consumption and to find places for our waste. Recycling is not working, and we have no alternatives at present than create landfills or incinerators.

I recently read that the rising ocean levels are threatening our coastline and our cities, Boston and New York in particular, are already seeing problems with flooding and are being threatened by rising oceans. Can we use our garbage to build up our coastlines? Can new landfills be built right in vulnerable areas and the methane used for power and the garbage used as islands? Far-fetched, but thoughts. I have no idea what we are going to do in our inland areas with garbage and waste, let alone what will be done in coastal areas. It doesn’t make sense to me, either, that we send our garbage miles and miles away by truck or barge or train and waste even more energy resources to send it away from where we live at a cost not just of money but of energy waste and pollution. I don’t have any solutions, I just know that it makes sense for all of us to think about waste and be prepared for the day when we have nowhere to send our garbage.

The motto of the Girl Scouts when I was a little kid working toward badges and trying to become a good citizen was Be Prepared. We are far from prepared when it comes to taking care of our resources, using only what we need and being good citizens of the planet when it comes to trash. We are not being very good Girl Scouts.

Becky Nelson is co-owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, New Hampshire. [email protected].