Last Sunday the cover of The New York Times Metropolitan Section featured a picture of all the plastic and paper that ends up being dumped in landfills due to a lack of recycling facilities in public places. The article, headlined, “Lunch, Landfills and What I Tossed” by Mireya Navarrow, while giving New York City generally high marks for recycling, noted that inorganic containers left in trash containers are adding to a mountain of waste. But what really excited me about this messy and slipshod situation was the opportunity for reprocessing it presented to anyone with enough ingenuity and imagination to both take advantage of and alleviate it.
What the accompanying photo showed were resources like PET plastic, which is currently in high demand by Coke, Pepsi, Nestle and other companies that would like to increase the percentage of recycled materials they use. And that’s not to mention the polypropylene (another wonderful material) and aluminum seals from yogurt cups and paper containers for carrying fast food. While to many it may have appeared to be an ugly picture of our throwaway society’s wanton wastefulness, to me it was a little bit like looking at a lovely girl with dreamy eyes and a vision for the future.
Imagine the fuel and water we will save when every one of the aforementioned materials is deposited in a closed loop system (which I’m confident will eventually be the case). Imagine, too, a time when landfills will be reduced to a fraction of their present environmental impact. It’s a problem that we’re fully capable of solving with existing technology, thereby turning a burden into a benefit for society and a boon for the enterprising individuals who decide to take it on.