Time Capsules

July 11, 2006

The average householder is guided by a mixture of wishful thinking and misinformation in his daily garbage habits. Undoubtedly, this state of delusion is in part due to the fact that thinking about garbage is painful. It exposes the unpleasant underbelly of a consumerism that, for the most part, we are very deeply committed to as individuals and as a society. The age of innocence is over, though. We no longer heedlessly toss out our scraps. But toss them we do, because our material hunger continues unabated.

To mention just one example of our penchant for unfinished thoughts on the subject of garbage, most of us are persuaded that biodegradable products are better than non-biodegradables. We like the idea of biodegradable plastics, for instance. We are glad that our fast-food purveyors no longer wrap their burgers in polystyrene. Given a choice between paper or plastic, we're apt to think we should go with paper. And it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that garbage that goes away (eventually) is preferable over garbage that stays with us forever?

Unfortunately, garbage dumps are typically not environments that encourage biodegradation, as anyone should know who’s tried to make compost. It takes some doing before the potato peels, egg shells, coffee grinds, and apple cores lose their specificity and sink back into the kind of mush you would consider reapplying to the tomatoes in your backyard. In landfills, conditions favorable to biodegradation generally don’t occur, and the vast majority of the waste, including the highly degradable organics, simply persist in more or less pristine condition.

But rather than weep, we should in fact rejoice, because biodegradation in landfills is highly undesirable. Decomposing organics produce methane, a greenhouse gas, and leachate, the liquid byproduct of decaying garbage. Our landfills are riddled with heavy metals and poisonous chemicals and overlaid with a rich bacterial culture, all of which have a tendency to travel in leachate, which therefore poses a significant environmental hazard. Obviously, we want as little of it as possible. And so the latest in environmental engineering is to seal off garbage dumps hermetically from air and water, the agents of biodegradation, by means of plastic and impermeable clay liners. While a landfill is active, exposure to air and water is inevitable, and systems are put in place to capture the resulting leachate and methane. But once a dump is closed and topped with an impermeable clay cap, biodegradation eventually grinds to a halt altogether.

The result is an odd kind of irony. We live in a society not given to preservation, but we do very carefully preserve our garbage. Even as we wonder what to tell the future about ourselves and labor to select items to include in time capsules, we are creating vast treasure troves of information about ourselves—even interleaving newspapers to facilitate dating the strata—which will be available to any future generations who really care to know about us.

We have to recognize that preserving our garbage is vastly better than letting it poison us, but it is nevertheless also true that there is something intensely perverse about saving it up for the future. If we figure out how to solve the problem of global warming, if we limit our growth and husband our resources carefully enough, then eventually we will have to confront these environmental juggernauts. Which is just to say that, if this is the best that we can do, then there is bound to be a day of reckoning.

Marijke Rijsberman