Chapter 3 Our Primary Global Solution to Waste: Bury It

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© Vladimir Jotov/Shutterstock.com

When I was a child, I had a pet rabbit that lived in a large cage on our apartment balcony. Every day I would feed her the vegetable peelings from our kitchen; she would happily eat them, later pooping out whatever her body didn’t use as spherical, pearl-like droppings in one corner of her cage. She would spend the rest of her time hanging out, dreaming perhaps about nice boy rabbits, in another corner of the cage. I never once saw her venture near the “poop corner” unless she had some specific business to do. Come to think of it, if I were that rabbit, I probably wouldn’t either.

The desire to be as far away from one’s own waste as possible seems to be hardwired in us. Landfills constantly face NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) challenges when getting zoned, and property values are lower near sewage treatment facilities, landfills, and composting sites. People simply don’t like hanging out near waste. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why we invented the toilet. If you deconstruct what a toilet is, beyond being a nice ceramic seat, it’s a device whose purpose is to move our waste far away from us as fast as mechanically possible.

The rate of innovation in the waste management industry is much lower than in other industries like beverages or pharmaceuticals. It’s simply not desirable to hang out in garbage; or, by extension, it’s not sexy to work in the field of waste management. When you ask a child what he wants to be when he grows up, you expect to hear things like “policeman” or “baseball player” but never “garbage man.” And if a child did express an interest in eventual employment in the waste management industry, you’d probably cringe and explain that being a doctor or lawyer might be a better path.

A key aspect of outsmarting waste is rethinking our relationship with it. Instead of running away from waste and hoping something else will take care of it, we must actively take ownership of it. We should not only own the problem but embrace it. While I still advise being repulsed by one’s own feces, if we make solving garbage sexy and celebrate it, we can spur much needed innovation in the field.