Trash Talk

- By Rich Lancaster

Can you guess what America’s largest single export is? I bet you can’t!
Well, believe it or not it is waste paper and cardboard. We export over 6 MILLION tons a year (which is equivalent to 600 large oil tankers, hard to imagine really).

Speaking of trash, did you know that each American produces over 4.4 pounds of trash each day – that’s 231 MILLION tons of trash being produced by 295 million Americans annually. That is staggering.

So, where do you think that trash goes after you’ve crammed it in the trash bin and it’s been hauled away by the guys who pick it up from outside your residence?
With the Holiday Season upon us, and conspicuous consumption being the tradition of our materialistic society, it got me wondering about how much “stuff” is going to be hauled away from my house, where it would go, and most importantly, how it would be treated (and whether any of it would be repurposed or disposed of adequately).
Here’s what I learned:  

My household trash is picked up by a contractor to the City of Issaquah and hauled to a variety of facilities. The ordinary “non-recyclable” household trash goes to the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill in Maple Valley. Landfills in Washington are filling up fast and then being shut down and monitored over time.  Areas of the Eastside still use the local landfill, but the City of Seattle actually ships its waste to a landfill in Oregon (something I found surprising and a little disturbing in a way).

 These days it is generally understood that waste from human settlements can be automatically sorted and the valuable substances it contains almost completely recovered. So, “burying and forgetting” our trash is not a very sustainable or forward thinking solution. Just why Oregon chooses to allow Washington to dump tens of thousands of tons of trash in their state is kind of beyond me. 

The future for our trash needs to be quite different. In Germany the latest Waste to Energy (WTE) technology is being deployed in Hamburg to incinerate household trash in a Thermal Recycling Facility. By-products of this process create energy used to power local households as well as ash that is used in road construction.  In the US there are several dozen WTE plants across the country, but no new ones have been built in the past 10 years. Seattle needs to look to Hamburg for help in reducing it’s dependency on exporting trash.

The travels of my household recyclable waste tell quite a different story to the non-recyclable. My yard and food waste is picked up weekly and driven to Cedar Grove Composting, also in Maple Valley. Here this organic waste is composted and eventually turned in to very high quality soil additives, this is a very holistic and useful cycle.

Recyclable trash is hauled to yet another facility in Kirkland where the paper, glass and plastic is further sorted, then baled and reshipped to a variety of manufacturers who repurpose the material. Again this is laudable and pretty well holistic.

In the final analysis the aspect of our trash that is really not well handled is clearly household non-recyclables. This area needs attention, and as it is the single biggest in terms of tonnage annually, it is a massive opportunity. A national program to incinerate household trash needs to be considered, hopefully soon after the next election, that’s if the politician’s will listen to the voice of reason and sustainability.

My guess is that if trash could talk it would say “burn me!”