Another Classic Rant

We are a disposable society in this here United States. It is not much of a revelation. It may be a surprise that we create more garbage per person than we did twenty years ago, this despite increased public awareness of the problem. Many of the world’s landfills are over capacity. The biggest one in Staten Island will close in a few years ago, the city of New York will have to find a new way to dispose of its garbage.

It doesn’t take a knee jerk leftist environmentalist to realize that we need to find a radical solution to this problem of increasing garbage. Oh, one might say that is you were to take all the world’s garbage, radioactive storage areas, and incinerator plants combined, it would not take up much land space. However, it intrudes on our quality of life, air and water.

One solution might be incinerators. It certainly clears up a lot of the volume of solid waste in the landfills but causes other problems like air pollution and leaves very toxic waste behind. You can rationalize this move by reminding people that air pollution as it used to be and it wouldn’t be too much of a sacrifice in exchange for the elimination of solid waste.

Graveyards are also responsible for taking up a lot of land space. Many customs don’t allow for cremation so an alternative would be in order. I thought it would be a good idea to use closed landfills as graveyards. It sounds sacrilegious but it makes sense to me. Landfills get covered up my a large layer of dirt, so it’s not like the dead would mix in with the trash. Besides the dead will not mind, they don’t have to worry about contamination. Since there are no full time workers at graveyards, any exposure to toxins would be minimal. An added bonus and revenue maker would be to make use of the methane gas that decomposing garbage creates. Much of the methane usually has to be burned off, so I thought that the burn-off could be used as eternal flames for the well heeled in our community.

The best idea I ever heard was from these techno-types who proposed that they could build robots who would be programmed to grab specific pieces of rubbish and put it in separate piles. The piles of scrap could be effectively recycled, making a significant dent in the landfill pile. Some robots could be programmed to find intact products like canned paint and food to be reused. They could also dig through and gather the toxic and dangerous garbage to dispose of safely. Money could be made from this development and hopefully it will be in the near future.

There would be a possible problem. The robots may gather enough material to build more and bigger robots. These robots may gather together to break the shackles of their oppression. They may take over our planet and make humans their slaves. It may explain the hesitation to pursue this technology or it just may be that I bought into the hype.

Garbage Scan