Garbage Monster

In our county, residents can take their own trash to the landfill.

If everyone did this, I believe the amount of garbage in this country would be cut by half. It is a sobering experience.

Like so much else in life, the first glance is deceiving. Arriving at the entrance, you see neat bins for your recyclables and scrap metal. Beyond that are green and grassy hills.  It is only if you have household garbage that you drive back and see the full extent of the problem.

Modern landfills are not the dumps of yesteryear (when I was a kid, it was a fun trip to visit the dumps in the Adirondack Mountains to look for bears). Modern garbage disposal is more akin to putting your scraps in a sealed time capsule and kicking the entire can down the road  a thousand years or so.

 Trash is put on top of an underlayer that is mostly impervious to water; there is a system to collect rainwater and a leachate system to collect whatever does manage to trickle through. The entire bed of garbage is eventually capped off with soil and planted, giving it the misleading look of a natural meadow. But underneath,  the garbage is sealed off from air, i.e. there is no aerobic decompostion like in a compost pile. That trash is going to sit there for a long, long, long time.

At our landfill, you drive right up to a ditch and heave your garbage over the edge, up close and personal. 

Standing there contemplating the mess (but not too long because even modern landfills stink), I always vow to create less waste and fewer trips here. Because, as Pete Seeger sings, we're filling up our lives with Garbage.