The Centrality of Trash in Our Lives/Cities

The garbage patches that call our seas and oceans home aren't as popular as they should be. I reckon they are a sight to behold. They travel, which makes all five or six of them seasoned globetrotters. They currently reside in the ocean closest to you and are sadly preparing to move closer to you on land. Your patch will perhaps carry with it microorganisms and substances that have morphed from plastic and paper into soupy alien materials. 

Have you ever wondered which of the wrappers from your latest item of clothing or wondered which one of the five grocery bags you brought home this evening will end up gyrating and globetrotting along with billions of other items in the garbage patches? The patch closest to home for me is the South Atlantic and the North Atlantic and I shudder at the thought of my contribution to the waste problem that Earth is facing.

I heard on the local news the other day that because the origins of the garbage patches cannot be credited and blamed on any one particular country, no one is taking responsibility for the cleanup. Quite understandable because the attempt would bankrupt any country. And who's to say that after your bold attempt at using your citizens' taxes to clean up the patch closest to you, another of the five patches with its own gyre won't add a fresh million items to begin your new patch. The gyres accumulate plastic by the power of the planet's rotation, ocean current, and wind. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch closest to the west coast of the USA is recorded to hold approximately 80,000 tons of plastic, and weighs the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets. The North Atlantic garbage patch is fittingly catered to directly by Nations on either side of the North Atlantic but care should be taken in attributing cause since the trash isn't tracked (it probably should) and could have travelled from other parts of the world via wild ocean currents. Countries like Portugal and the UK in Europe, Morocco and Western Sahara in Africa, and the states of Massachusetts, New York in the USA, numerous islands in the tip of the South American Continent, and Nova Scotia in Canada are all affected Just enough gyre could move this patch towards the population of people on these coasts, with close enough proximity to poison food like fish and damage the beauty and function of ports.

It is at this point in the waste issue that I think that the momentum that recycling has built is being defeated at a much higher rate of the exponentiality of waste generation. The global recycling momentum builds and takes a lot of will and effort from individuals and companies or enterprises alike but nothing compares to the way we dump our trash. To sort your trash these days if you live in the United Kingdom, you will have to separate home compostable material from industrial compost, waste from plastic resin or PET, aluminum and steel from glass, and paper. All these items have patented logos, color-coded bins, and possible fines in some countries if you disrupt the order of the collection process. South Korea, for example, has a well-defined policy for waste categorization and collection, and the process is typically technology-driven. The waste hack nation of the century is South Korea, where policymakers have installed solar-powered smart street compactors with wifi to notify contractors when collection is due. Talk less of whole towns or municipalities that were developed from the ground up for the purpose of green and blue development. Along the green value chain, phone applications as a source of alert systems to inform city dwellers of when their payments are due, when their trash is full, and when disruptions to their trash collection are scheduled. These types of arrangements are prevalent in America as well, with Baltimore and Ecube Labs going into a partnership to provide this type of street-installed trash compaction technology for its citizens.

In 2021, computer and electronic products were the second highest grossing manufacturing sector in the USA with an estimated $300bn; plastics and rubber products came in at approximately $60bn. In contrast, the largest waste management company in the USA and in the world, Waste Management (I know), is based in Texas and accrued an impressive $14.5bn in 2022 with a network of 293 landfill sites, 436 transfer stations, 146 recycling facilities, and 26,000 active trucks. Their services include waste conversion to energy, single-stream recycling, and e-cycling. The global recycling industry is estimated to rake in about $484bn by 2025; a CAGR of 6% from 2017.

So in essence, Waste Management and its peers, (Republic Services in Arizona was second with a revenue of $9.4bn) have to clean up a mess that is developed by 243,687 manufacturing firms for customers all over the world. Add the clean-up of imported products unaccounted for here and all other materials that scientifically don't biodegrade easily and which might still end up in one of the patches earlier mentioned. The total output from manufacturing in the USA in 2021 was $2.5trn.

The United Nations has a method to the trash madness, because who else will save the day if not the United Nations? With the establishment of the IPLA (International Partnership for Expanding Waste Management Services of Local Authorities) in 2011, the mandate to use communication to spread awareness and facilitate best practices for the adoption of infrastructure that will address waste management across borders and boundaries was detailed into policy. The mission of SDG 12 is to achieve sustainable consumption and production and the obvious vision is to rid the planet of a great chunk of its excess waste from source. The amount of work and the outlook are stark and knee-buckling but someone has to do it and boldly start from somewhere at that.

To be brutally honest, we are all consumers and are slaves to our needs and our inability to just stop buying everything we desire. Thus, the straight and truthful solution is to clean up after ourselves but the mess we're leaving behind is starting to crawl into our food at an alarming scale, and also into our food's food (the plastic in the water content of the fish we buy, etc.).

It will become harder and harder to control all the negative impacts if there is a negative multiplying effect where the success of an SDG goal isn't feeding the success of other closely associated goals. As the Dad in ‘Kim’s Convenience’ would always say, “You/We can do better!!”