Yesterday’s Trash: The Town of Tomorrow
[I:http://www.recyclingproducts.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/KateKew9.jpg]In one of his well known illustrations, Jesus told the listening crowds of his day that a city set on a hill could not be hidden. His point was about the abundantly obvious: a prominent community cannot help but broadcast messages about its culture, in the same manner as beacons guide travelers in choosing what to follow and what to avoid. Ironically, there are cities of varying sizes today built on the top of towering refuse heaps, such as the infamous ones of Calcutta and Mexico City. The messages of these particular communities are overt but a great deal of the planet’s cities hold lesser known tales and <a href=”http://www.butlerdisposal.com/”>county recycling</a>.
Throughout urban history, mankind has repeatedly built commercial, spiritual and recreational centers on top of rubble and refuse. Some cultures are just better at hiding this sordid fact than others. It is common enough to see headlines announcing interesting discoveries of previous civilization when ground is broken on a city’s new building projects. Sometimes the find is a brick and mortar wall of an ancient bastion, sometimes it is the humble shards of broken pottery or a laborer’s lost tools.
All cultures, regardless of their affluence, have refuse and broken things they leave in their trail. Occasionally the purpose of certain mysterious mounds remain unclear to a current civilization and theories are debated among archaeologists: Was this a specific ceremonial structure or was this hillock no more than a place where ancient peoples dumped the shells of their sea harvest?
Which leads to the question of how our own culture’s mounds, known as landfills, will fare by the pen of future historians. Preserved scraps of printed material and broken bits of house wares should be fairly easily understood but what will the interpretation be of the enormous deposits of fetid plastic-skinned paper products that are sure to be found there? What conclusions will they draw about the foundation upon which they built their cities – the bizarre foundation of adult diapers?
Incredibly, diapers account for almost 10% of our society’s household garbage. Sources claim that 3% of these are baby diapers, the remaining 7% balance being adult diapers. Babies tend to outgrow diapers after about two and a half years. But with life expectancy on the rise and more of our population heading into the senior years when incontinence products again can become an issue, it is easy to see how future adult diapers statistics can become be quite dire. Diapers are considered to be the third largest contributor to landfill waste. Adult bodies are a lot larger than toddlers’. So as the diaper demographic shifts, it is no surprise that much more space will be required for their disposal.
Arriving in the landfill, adult diapers along with their smaller colleagues, have a notorious fraternity with discarded aluminum cans. Aluminum cans take up to 200 years to return to dust, diapers possibly taking the same amount of time if not more in some estimates. You may ask in dismay, “Why so long?” The answer has to do with oxygen and ironically, what it takes to run a well maintained landfill. Running contradictory to the oxygen requirement of decomposition, many landfills daily apply a six inch layer of soil to newly arrived refuse in an effort to minimize the public unpleasantness. In combination with the effort to keep the presence of water, which delivers oxidizing benefits, to a minimum at these sites for a myriad of public health concerns, trash is practically mummified by the “dry tomb effect”. It is unlikely that future archaeologists will be as excited by our well preserved used incontinence products as they would be of ancient pharaoh’s tomb.
“Brownfield” is the ecological term for a fallow landfill site before it is cleaned up – how appropriate when considering the diaper element. Brownfields become the mounds upon which expanding cities are built, today and long into the future. The press of urban life and its real estate requirements eventually dictate that developers turn the soil and turn a buck. Planners’ designs make it possible to completely ignore the history of the compacted detritus of broken hair dryers, rotting sofas and adult diapers that lie beneath. They dutifully follow the real estate maxim that location is everything: Everyone knows that if you want a great view, build on a hill.