The cost of convenience in trash collection

I'm dating myself here, but as child growing up in the late 1950s, I remember my mother carefully wrapping the garbage (food wastes) in newspapers every night and putting them in the garbage can by the garage. A company emptied it every week. Boy did it stink!

We put trash (bottles, cans, excess wire coat hangers, broken toys, and the like) in a different can by the garage, and a different company hauled it off. We did not throw out pop bottles; we had to pay a deposit on them, so we returned the empties to the store. As for waste paper, it was my job to empty the waste baskets from time to time into an incinerator and watch over it while it burned.

I suppose that was common all over the country. In 1961, Sam Yorty became mayor of Los Angeles. As part of his campaign, he promised to eliminate the necessity of separating wet and dry garbage. Actually, since the county had banned backyard incineration in 1957, citizens of Los Angeles had to deal with three different collections.

Of course, I have no recollection of Yorty; I grew up in Ohio. Somehow, though, the idea of a single collection of all refuse became the national norm. At some point, my home town also banned backyard incineration. I recall how strange it felt to mingle waste paper, cans, and food waste in the same trash can.

Ironically, the environmental movement began before the end of the decade. After the first Earth Day, in 1970, recycling became a mainstream idea, but not yet a mainstream practice. Perhaps older people recalled recycling and conservation as Depression and wartime necessities and resisted doing it again. Certainly younger people, having recently been freed from the necessity of separating garbage, did not want to have to do it again.

The practice of recycling would probably have caught on faster than it did if everyone were still in the habit of discarding wet and dry garbage into different collection receptacles.

If the practice of separation had continued, it would have been possible to compost the wet garbage. As it is, the commingling of wet and dry garbage limits waste disposal options. In the US, most waste eventually winds up in landfills.

There are two huge problems with landfills. They consume almost 3,500 acres of land per year. As landfills reach capacity, it is increasingly difficult to find land for new ones. Geologically, only certain sites are suitable. And of course, no one wants a new landfill built nearby.

Environmental hazards of landfills vary with their design and management. Problems at older or poorly managed landfills include foul smell, wind-blown litter, vermin, and the generation of a toxic liquid known as leachate.

To prevent those problems, newer designs call for a clay or plastic liner to contain the leachate and keep it from contaminating ground water. Each day's accumulation of new garbage must be covered to keep it in place and to avoid attracting vermin.

As a consequence, the landfill smells better, but the garbage decomposes much more slowly. And so the landfill reaches capacity more quickly. In addition, landfills produce methane and other greenhouse gasses.

I'm a musician and librarian. I do not claim to be an expert on waste management. But I can't help thinking that if Americans had had an uninterrupted practice of separating solid wastes, we would be composting the wet garbage. Recycling would be easier and would remove more from the waste stream than it currently does.

And above all, disposal non-recyclable dry waste would not produce so much gas and leachate byproducts. As a consequence, its disposal would be less environmentally hazardous, less expensive, and less controversial.

The cost of convenience at the grocery store

It used to be that preparing meals for a family took a woman most of the day, especially back when she had to raise and slaughter whatever animals provided meat and grow her own produce.

Nowadays, we can buy, say, lasagna from the freezer section of the grocery store, bread from the deli section, and a bag or two of salad from the produce section. That can provide a complete meal for a family with practically no effort. As a percentage of the family's income, it probably costs less than our great grandparents paid for one of their meals.

What is the real cost of this convenience? Let me count the ways:

1. The energy costs of manufacturing, packaging, and distributing the food, not to mention hauling the used packaging away from the house, contribute to each person's carbon footprint. We have not yet devised any method of manufacturing, transportation, or waste management that does not result in some kind of pollution. We import too much of our energy, most from nations that are not our friends.

2. The manufacturer of the lasagna has spent a great deal of money to determine how to make the tastiest product it can with the lowest cost. There's nothing wrong with trying to provide good value and get repeat business. Unfortunately, the lasagna, along with all other prepared meals, gives its pleasure through layers of fat, sugar, and salt. The human body easily becomes addicted to the accumulation of these ingredients, resulting in our current obesity epidemic, with all its consequences for people's health.

3. The whole meal probably came from miles away. In addition to the transportation costs, the distance has an accountability cost. Remember when packaged spinach was recalled? Carelessness at one farm resulted in contaminated spinach. That spinach was mixed together with spinach from other farms and distributed all over the country. Some of the packages contained toxins from the contamination. Most probably did not. And yet all of it had to be recalled. There was no economical way to determine which few packages were not fit to sell.

More could be said, but this is enough for one post. Do I mean we have to give up all our conveniences? No. I'd rather cook my own lasagna than buy it from the freezer section, but I certainly like having packaged mixed greens available. I wouldn't eat multiple kinds of lettuce fast enough to keep from throwing most of it out.

Meanwhile, I do believe that if more people cooked their own lasagna and/or clamored for real food, the kind you actually have to chew, restaurants and manufacturers would be happy to supply more wholesome and less addictive products. After all, if people stop buying addictive food that makes them unfit and unhealthy, manufacturers will have no choice but to start making what customers will want.

It would be nice if more things could be grown, packaged, and distributed locally. A bad batch of something would not require destruction of the good with the bad over half the country.

Does convenience have to cost so much? Can we find a way to get the costs under control? Are "efficiencies of scale" really all that efficient?