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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Nobody wants to live near landfill – aka disposal site or any other euphemism for a garbage dump – and yet they are a burgeoning eyesore (and nose-sore) on American urban and rural landscapes.
Northeastern Los Angeles lies within the shadow of the Glendale solid-waste-and-junk-burial, sanitized as the Scholl Canyon Landfill complete with a golf course and tennis courts on top… a major source of particulate pollution, groundwater poisoning, and methane flaring.
Notably, it is now accepting disaster-related waste including fire debris.
All the greenwashing in the world cannot remove that it poses severe dangers to residents. Along with the health hazards and it being a source for global warming fumes, the dump – and its flammable anerobic outgassing – lies in a high-risk earthquake zone within half a mile of the Verdugo fault.
A fault capable of tremors up to 6.9 on the Richter scale. Twelve more faults lie within 15 miles, with one capable of reaching 7.8 and quakes tend to generate sparks from falling power lines and other electric malfunctions which could ignite a maelstrom of wildfires in the hills above Eagle Rock.
The throw-away single-use mentality in the United States goaded by generations of government guidance extolling consumerism to drive economic growth, spawns three times the average global waste per person and has crowned the country king of plastic, municipal, hazardous, and food waste production.
Almost a thousand pounds per capita of trash lands in landfills while Americans recycle less than half of that… significantly less once one factors in inappropriate amounts of greenwashing by corporate behemoths.
On top of municipal waste more than five times that of Germany – its closest competitor – Americans with their obsession on cleanliness want all the junk they toss in their garbage cans to sanitarily disappear – no fuss, no muss.
For years Los Angeles made a profit off that predilection, selling SoCal trash as recycling to poorer countries with fewer restrictions on disposal, and poverty-stricken inhabitants not averse to mining smelly toxic slime for the few nuggets of profit.
The rest? Spread on the outskirts of their cities for the poorest to construct shanties on and of. Strewn on their beaches, polluting their rivers and ground water. Cutting short their lives and those of their children.
The bean-counters at City Hall may bemoan the loss of income and the corresponding red ink in the Sanitation Department’s budget, but we in the United States have a moral obligation to look beyond our sanitized society to address the devastation our profligate waste generates.
Perhaps nowhere does global inequality manifest itself more than in the global south, consigned to be the repository for First World rubbish.
The impact is monumental - to air and water, to land and health, to ecosystems and whole economies.
Recent exposés reveal:
“Young Ghanaian men sifting through broken electronics by day and coughing up blood by night.”
“Indonesians eating tofu poisoned by Western waste.”
“Vietnamese villagers exposed to dangerous levels of brain-damaging microplastics.”
The growth of American manufacturing in the last century driving mass consumerism and the throw-away society culminated in its overflowing landfills.
Mining and construction, transportation and the production of non-repairable goods created piles of toxic industrial waste.
As Rachel Carson and her peers called out governments on the scientifically-documented dangers of pollution in the 1950s and 60s, it led to tighter regulations. Faced with the steep costs of mitigating health and environmental hazards, manufacturers and localities cast around for other solutions.
Light bulb: export it to Third World countries.
By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals earned one-way tickets from the United States and Europe to Caribbean beaches, African gorges, and Latin American wetlands, at least partially responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths annually and contributing to cataclysmic environmental damage.
Countries that had freed themselves from the yoke of colonialism in the 1960s found their land and water inundated by purveyors of Western industrial waste, an injustice Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s president from 1978-2002, christened “garbage imperialism.”
Calling cessation of waste export a moral imperative, more than a million people and dozens of developing nations demanded change.
The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal restricting transfers of hazardous waste came into force in 1992, ratified by nearly every nation in the world… but notably not the United States.
Today one in twenty items in global supply chains is a form of plastic.
Today, waste export is burgeoning through the loophole of recyclables, ostensibly bringing jobs to the poor and salvation to the planet.
Even the Mafia has its tentacles in the easy profits to be made from trash transfers which remain grossly underregulated and unmonitored.
Too mountainous to even attempt to recycle, in Java first world garbage is incinerated to cook food in open markets, providing daily doses of toxins from incinerated plastic to Indonesians.
European plastic waste flows into Turkey at the rate of one dump truck roughly every 15 minutes.
Anyone eating an egg a day in Agbogbloshie, a squalid district of Accra, is absorbing 220 times maximum safe amounts of chlorinated dioxins, a toxic byproduct of electronic waste.
The stench and debris of foreign garbage ravaged Kenya’s landscapes for decades – plastic bags blowing in the wind, wrapping around people and trees, blocking drainage, causing floods.
Almost 70% of discarded plastic polluted the county’s waterways. Half of foraging cattle had plastic in their stomachs. And the people raised a stink.
Effective 2017, the government banned plastic bags outright with strong enforcement provisions. In 2020, again with strong public backing, it banned other single-use plastics, including bottles and straws, in national parks and other protected jurisdictions.
Similar to what has been happening in the United States and around the world.
But there is too much money to be made and not enough political will to easily legislate traveling trash out of existence. Worldwide, waste “management” is a trillion-dollar industry worth more than the global arms, timber and wheat trades combined.
And, it’s the wealthiest companies with the money to invest in effective lobbying that have the most to lose if forced to clean up their garbage at home and remediate all the damages.
Led by American corporate greed, the world’s major chemical manufacturers and fossil fuel companies conspired to pressure the United States to demand a reversal of the ban and acquiescence to continued acceptance of Western waste as part of trade negotiations. Eventually unsuccessful. But there is too much profit involved for them to give up.
Kenya continues on the rocky road to further restrict plastics proliferation, most recently by banning plastic garbage bags themselves, a shining example of what can be done.
Rare is the garbage that benefits anyone as anyone who has ever watched Annie Leonard’s “Story of Stuff” animated videos – many still available on YouTube – will remember.
Today on Planet Earth the adage that “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is the exception, not the rule.
Please think twice before throwing anything away. Learn to repair what is broken. Repurpose items to a new life. Compost foodstuffs for your community. Donate something you no longer have a use for to someone who needs it.
And think thrice before buying something – do you really, really need this? If you do, can you borrow or rent it? Join a sharing app in your neighborhood.
Do your part it taking in the trash, not spreading it worldwide.
(Liz Amsden recently in Los Angeles now resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
