Swimming in a Sea of Sewage

Off the microphone of RE

Aired on the Doomstead Diner on September 1, 2014

Discuss this Photo Essay & Rant at the Podcast Table inside the Diner

The Fresh Kills (sic) Staten Island Landfill

Park Ave, NYC Trash. No, this was NOT during the strikes of 1975 or 1981. This was shot in 2010

Cockroaches on the streets of Naples, Italy in 2012

Rats at the Buffet Table in NYC

Fishing in Beijing

More Chinese Fishing

Blue Water is soooo Yesterday…

Refreshing the Water Bottle in Shanghai

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Biking is Great Aerobic Exercise!

TEPCO sez, “No worries, we will store all the water as Ice Cubes after we Freeze it”

BP sez, “Gulf Shrimp thrive on Corexit”

BC Scientists are BAFFLED by Starfish Melting disease!

Even Crabs get the Blues sometimes…

Snippet:

…Mostly, the trash is put “Out of Site-Out of Mind” in Landfills that are fairly distant from your Suburban bedroom community, so you don’t see them or smell them unless you take your own drive over to the dump to dispose of some of your junk. Mostly we employ public and private Garbagemen for this task, so you don’t see it unless you have one of these jobs. At least we used to call them Garbagemen when I was a kid, now they are called Sanitation Engineers. This sounds sufficiently technical we imagine ourselves to be cleaner I suppose.

Besides the individual waste is the Industrial waste which gets produced along with the products you buy and eventually send to the dump. This includes megatons of slag produced in mining operations and more tons of toxic chemicals. This stuff eventually works its way into the groundwater, which then needs to be “processed” to keep it potable, which takes enormous scale water processing plants in Big Shities which themselves take enormous quantities of energy to run, and after filtering the poisons out of your drinking water, they again need to be disposed of.

So you constantly fight an ever increasing pile of waste, which as the density of the population increases begins to overwhelm any natural processes which might recycle the waste into something which doesn’t pose a health hazard, not just for Hom Sapiens, but most of the other creatures sharing the environment with you…

For the rest, LISTEN TO THE RANT!!!

5 Comments

Stucky

September 1, 2014 11:22 am

So now YOU’RE doing Pictorial Essays too? Blow me.

NJ recycles about 50% of its waste … the rest we send to PA. So, no problems with that.

Alpine Valley Ski Resort in MI is a “mountain” built from garbage. There are other such projects around the country.
[img]http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRr3HMhF_ZZqsKOkfS_E0Daiiev7rKBy5L_D__5qYLA8OGJl-5FfQ[/img]

California handles their garbage by turning it into TV shows. Ya just gotta be creative …

duo

September 1, 2014 1:37 pm

It looks like 90% of that NYC “garbage” is recyclable plastic. When my city started recycling I went from a full trash can a week to about one a month. The recycling bin may end up in a landfill, but a different one further away, maybe.

IndenturedServant

September 1, 2014 3:18 pm

Same here duo. Actually my city had a recycling program for years but the only thing they accepted was plastic bottles with certain markings, glass and newspaper. Last year they finally implemented a program that accepts everything except food, thin film plastics and a couple other items. The only drawback I see is that they want us to rinse food residues out of all containers. Seems like a hell of a waste of water to me.

Reverse Engineer

Author

September 1, 2014 8:09 pm

Piling garbage up to make a mountain and covering it with dirt to drop ski slopes on doesn’t make the garbage disappear. Would you drink the water from a well bored next to that mountain?

50% Recycling is also mythology. The 50% recycled comes back as Garbage again after the second round, so now you have 75% of the original total at the dump. After the 3rd round, 87.5% of the original material is in the dump. Round 93.75% is in the dump.

Not to mention the recycling process creates its own waste and utilizes a lot of energy. One of the reasons recycling never took off that well is generally it is cheaper to make new plastic/glass bottle from raw material than to recycle the old ones.

Nature can take care of just about all garbage except Nuke Puke, but not at the volume and on the timescale we produce it in the industrial era. The proof is in the pudding, the Ocean is a sewer. Phytoplankton are down 50% from 30 years ago. Dead seals wash up on beaches and starfish melt.

Next time you wash your laundry with Tide Laundry Detergent, you make your contribution to the Ocean Toilet. Check out the Dead Zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River:

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