In order to compare the treatment of detritus by the U.S. and emerging nations, it is imperative we emphasize the differences between landfills and dumps.
Landfills are engineered and highly controlled land disposal sites for solid, non-hazardous waste in which delivered garbage is spread and compacted in layers a few feet thick. At least once a day the wastes are covered with a layer of earth and then compacted again making trash nearly invisible. Thick sheets of plastic liners are laid down at the lowest level to prevent contamination of the earth’s soil.
Examples of landfills are Sunshine Canyon and Puente Hills landfill in California.Conversely, a
dump, as the name suggests, is a location designated for disposal of nearly any type of garbage; these sites are often only valleys, quarries, or mines whose original owners allowed people to dump trash. Along with solid wastes, dumps allow household and commercial hazardous products and industrial materials. The open dump is a danger because of its potential for producing leachate, becoming a rodent and insect breeding ground, and its general health dangers. Dumps are now illegal in the United States and landfills are closely monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency. Interestingly, while landfills are considered more sanitary, lack of oxygen causes decomposition to occur at a radically slower (almost non-existent) rate.
Leachate and methane gas are both byproducts of collected garbage. Leachate is the liquid that results from rain and condensation, where natural moisture percolates through waste. The liquids migrating through the waste dissolve salts, pick up organic constituents and leach heavy metals. The organic strength of landfill leachate can be greater than 20 to 100 times the strength of raw sewage, making leachate a potentially potent polluter of soil and groundwater. In addition to leachate, as waste deteriorates they often produce gas. New landfills are required to have equipment to collect and pump methane gas. This gas can be burned at the surface or be refined and used as commercial fuel: in one case study, nearly 50,000 homes are provided electricity annually by the methane produced at one landfill. If not properly harnessed or disposed of, the collection of methane gas can be dangerous. Explosions and fires at old dumps and landfills are often the result of methane buildup.
The differentiation between landfills and dumps lends insight to the ways the U.S. views garbage. In her introduction to Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life, Kate Ford aptly summarized the culture of waste and forgetting that surrounds North American culture: “Although specters of monstrous landfills, overflowing sewers and catastrophic oil spills might disturb our dreams, Western civilisation has become adept at overlooking the filthy reality of everyday life . . . [T]hose who do the work of keeping dirt at bay are often felt by others to be contaminated simply by their association with it, something psychologist Paul Rozin attributes to a kind of 'magical' thinking” (1-2). This quote speaks directly to how the Western world views trash: as not our problem. We can ship it to developing countries or poorer states.
For example, the Fresh Kills dump located on New York’s Staten Island closed in 2001 after a long and arduous fight spearheaded by community members and the Staten Island borough President. New York now ships all the trash previous sent to Fresh Kills via railway to the Carolinas (Molinaro). The average American makes seven pounds of trash a day: across a lifetime that adds up to 102 tons of trash per person. In 2010 alone, Americans accumulated 250 million tons of garbage (Gutierrez and Webster). Yet we choose to overlook this ever-expanding problem.
In “Dishing the Dirt,” Rosie Cox delineates the historical processes that led to the Western world’s preoccupation with eliminating or glossing over dirtiness and waste. She points to the discovery of bacteria as the turning point for the development of a paranoia surrounding cleanliness: “[f]ollowing the discovery of bacteria, disinfection became the cornerstone of domestic dealings with dirt. . . [and] if germs can be eliminated by scrupulous hygiene, then the presence of disease in the home can only be due to a failure on the part of the housekeeper” (44). Cox continues to explain that “[c]leanliness, therefore, was a mark of wealth and status” (47), where the rich could afford to clean or veil their waste and the poor were destined to live amongst the debris. Landfills and their unsophisticated counterparts, dumps, perfectly illustrate the dichotomy formed between the binaries of wealth/cleanliness and poverty/dirtiness.
