Where Does Trash Really Go?

Being in Indonesia, I remember wondering where they put trash.

There was no real sanitation department where I was staying. Most people either burned their rubbish or piled it somewhere until it just disappeared, yet I never saw a garbage truck.

... One day on a drive to Uluwatu, I looked into the hazy distance and saw what I thought was a mountain. Then I remembered thats there are no mountains in southern Bali.

Well, except for this one ...

Sawung Landfill A mountain built entirely from the things people believed had been thrown away.

Standing there, looking at what I had mistaken for a mountain, I couldn't stop thinking...

If one landfill looks like that, what does the rest of the world look like?

Unfortunately, I didn't have to look very far.

Over the past several decades humanity has produced more plastic than during the entire previous century. Nearly half of all plastic manufactured today is designed to be used once and discarded.

Think about:

Plastic grocery bags. Plastic food packaging. Plastic bottles. Plastic utensils. Plastic straws. Shipping materials. Disposable menstrual products.  Takeout containers.

Depending on the material, these can take anywhere from 450 to well over 1,000 years to break down

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Most people imagine trash quietly sitting in a landfill. Unfortunately, that's only part of the story. Every year millions of tons of plastic escape into rivers, lakes, and streams before eventually being carried by ocean currents into enormous circulating systems known as gyres.

The most well-known of these is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between California and Hawaii. It is now a massive region where ocean currents concentrate millions of pieces of floating plastic, abandoned fishing gear, and microscopic debris across an area estimated to be several times larger than Texas.

Out there, plastics slowly breaks apart . Then breaks apart again. Then again. Until they eventually becoming micro-plastics. Because Earth is a closed system, nothing truly leaves. Things only changes form.

Plastics continually break down becoming micro-plastic. Micro-plastics become part of the water. The water becomes rain. The rain feeds the soil. The soil grows our food. The fish eat the plastic. Then we eat the fish.

The idea of "away" slowly finds its way back to us.

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Nature has never had a waste problem. A fallen leaf becomes soil. A dead tree becomes food. Waste from one organism becomes life for another. Nothing is wasted. Humanity may be the first species creating materials the Earth struggles to welcome back into her natural cycles.

That's why this conversation becomes existential.

How we treat the Earth reflects how we relate to ourselves.

If you believe you are separate from something, protecting it feels like a bubrden.

However, when we recognize that we are nature...

Protecting it becomes an act of self-respect.

As our understanding of plastic's destructive effects continues to grow, governments around the world have begun implementing restrictions on single-use plastics and Styrofoam products. While these efforts are encouraging, they alone won't solve a problem built on convenience.

Real difference begins with awareness and personal change.

We only get one Earth.

One HOME!

And she is asking us to honor that now.

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