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6 THE RURAL VOICE
DUMPS ARE OKAY, IT'S
THE HAZARDOUS WASTE
Adrian Vos, from Huron County, has
contributed to The Rural Voice since
its inception in 1975.
By the turn of the century most
landfill sites in Ontario will be full.
We can mend our wasteful ways, but
whatever we do, we will run out of
space for our garbage. This is the
doomsday message drummed into us.
What nonsense. We live in the se-
cond largest country in the world with
a tiny population of some 26 million,
and we run out of space.
In the Unites States, since the 70s,
studies have been done on what really
is in the garbage dumps of that coun-
try. The results also apply to Canada.
What must be improved, they found,
is the disposal of hazardous waste
such as motor oil, herbicides, half full
paint cans, turpentine, and other che-
micals. The remainder is no hazard.
But we can do better. The greater
emphasis on re -use (recycling) is a
welcome development. It is a return
to what we once did. As a kid in a
family some 60 years ago, we didn't
throw anything away. Nails were
straightened, shoes re -soled, clothing
patched and handed down to the next
in the family, and so on.
The Atlantic Monthly reports that
archaeologist Gordon R. Wiley, who
had dug up archaic middens and to-
day's dumps, found that nothing much
has changed since men became farm-
ers instead of hunters and gatherers.
From the very beginning, mankind has
dumped it, re -used it, or burned it.
Whatever we do, there will inevita-
bly be a residue of solid waste. There
has always been solid waste. Wiley
says that we forget that 1,200 pounds
of coal ash a year was created by eve-
ry American at the turn of the century,
and dumped at the poor side of town.
Or, what about the disposal of hund-
reds of thousands of dead horses in
each city. For instance, Manhattan to-
day is six feet higher than when Peter
Minuit lived there. We forget that
modern food packaging, so often con-
demned, prevents food waste, and thus
saves on garbage. He asks us to con-
sider, for instance, the can of fruit
juice. The producers sell the rinds for
animal feed, while householders throw
the rinds in the garbage.
In the beginning, we stated that by
the turn of the century all existing gar-
bage dumps will be full. That's cor-
rect, but only if no new permits are
issued.
The archaeologist mentioned above
weighed and sorted 16,000 lbs. of
garbage from seven dumps. In this
heap, he found 16 lbs. of fast food
packaging, less than one tenth of one
per cent of the total. But our funda-
mentalist environmentalists boycott
McDonald's instead of us, newspaper
readers, who are the real culprits.
Less than one per cent was disposable
diapers, another item that has drawn
much attention in the past few years.
And the supposedly greatest sinner —
all kinds of plastics together —
accounted for five per cent by weight
or 12 per cent by volume. Plastics, the
writer argues, are not the great sinner
either, because once flattened by the
weight of the landfill, they are stable
and don't give off toxins. The biggest
single item was paper, presumably
bio -degradable. However, 40 -year-old
papers did not degrade. They were
perfectly legible.
Re -use can decrease the need for
landfill sites by more than half. News-
paper recycling removes toxic inks
that eventually leach into ground-
water. Plastics recycling is in its in-
fancy, but already someone is making
a profit by turning it into building ma-
terial. Will our new barns be made
from recycled plastic and will this
save our forests? Paper recycling
mills will replace some lost lumber -
men's jobs. Furthermore, modern
incinerators, like the one in London,
do not emit dioxins and furans, and
convert some of our garbage into
energy.0