Waste Not, Want Not

An intriguing article: Click here.

Waste is a unique concept.

It really only came into use within the last century. Prior to that point, everything that wasn’t used more or less decomposed. Except, you know, pottery. And rocks and things.

But things are no longer so balanced. Even when we produce biodegradable materials, we produce them in such quantity that they can’t possibly be reabsorbed into the natural ecosystem. Take the so-called biodegradable plastics they’re producing now. Mostly they just break down into really tiny pieces, which is not actually biodegrading so much as- well, as getting really small. But all those tiny, tiny bits of plastic are still there- and what’s worse, they get eaten by tiny little creatures and then passed along up the food chain. Even to you.

Don’t believe me? Take mercury, for example. Mercury is a great example of why I get really irritated when people start the natural vs. artificial argument. “But mercury is natural!” they say. Yes, well, mercury is naturally occurring in the ground. It is not natural for it to be dragged up to the surface in massive quantity and pumped back out into the air. Yes, a stubborn person (and I know many) could even argue plastics are natural- they’re made out of petroleum, which is technically a natural substance. But plastics do not spontaneously occur in nature, we rearrange the molecules of petroleum to produce them. Therefore they are not natural, by dint of their rearranged chemical structure.

At any rate, mercury, in the small quantities that it exists in nature, is fine and dandy and does its thing. But when released in large quantities into the air- mostly from industrial sources- it falls back down to the earth in rain, where it flows into rivers and streams and eventually the ocean, and is absorbed by the plants in the water, which are in turn eaten by fish and other organisms, which are eaten by bigger fish, which are eaten by us. And on each step upward the quantity of mercury increases- because a big fish eats a lot of little fish, all of them contaminated. So when we eat a big fish- well, it's why you get those mercury warnings on seafood.

Plastic, at least for me, is even more horrifying. The numbers of how much plastic is currently in the environment are unbelievable. In the last fifty years humans have produced something on par with 1 billion tons. And it will never, ever, go away. At least not in any amount of time we can comprehend. And all of that will slowly move up the food chain, into our bodies, and remain there after we die. Pleasant thought.

So now we have all this waste, and nothing to do with it except wait for it to overcome us. But we (humans) are perpetrators of this mess we’re in (literally). We could stop producing plastic at any time. Oh, I realize this thought sounds horrifying to most people, and the typical response I get is a very mature, “Not-uh!” But we started making it, didn’t we? What’s keeping us from stopping?

Or we could keep going, and wait for the day when our own mountain of waste comes crushing down on top of us.