Imagine the number of batteries that don’t get responsibly recycled and end up in the landfill. If anyone has ever seen a corroded battery they get the picture of what is in the toxic soup that makes up the landfill. Imagine, too, all the magazines, newspapers, aluminum cans, glass and plastics, which could have been recycled, yet are also ingredients in this soup. Most of us spend very little time thinking about landfills especially in a state like Arizona with so much open land. Who ever sees a landfill or for that matter looks for one? Landfills are just that faraway place where our trash goes and gets buried. But there is more to the story.
Our local landfill is Graywolf located on Cherry Road which serves all of YavapaiCounty. It stands as a growing reminder of the ease with which we throw things away and allow them to pile up higher and higher. Resources once extracted from the Earth, processed in factories, shipped around the world and now buried forever at Graywolf.
So what is the trouble with landfills? Most people view them as a safe burial place for their trash. In reality landfills poison our air, water, land and food supplies. There is a lot of talk about sustainability yet use of landfills is largely overlooked and is in fact a totally unsustainable linear system of consumption and wasting. Truth be told, landfills are the largest human created source of methane gas, a significant contributor to global climate change. Moreover, gases that escape from the landfill are created by such chemicals as paint thinners, solvents, pesticides and other hazardous volatile organic compounds containing toxic pollutants that can cause serious health effects. In addition all landfills leak toxic leachate: even those called “state of the art” will eventually leak and pollute nearby groundwater. Leachate is produced by rainwater filtering down through the landfill which aids bacteria in the process of decomposition. The liquid can be virtually harmless or dangerously toxic depending on what is in the landfill.
Regrettably, many people have been heard to say they have no time to recycle; it is just more convenient to put things in the trash can and be done with it. Out of sight and out of mind. So what is the solution to reduce the need for more and more landfills? First and foremost it is our habits as consumers. We buy way too much stuff with way too much packaging. We then proceed to throw it away and buy more stuff. We buy harmful chemicals with no existing disposal or recycling options. At Sedona Recycles we believe that the time has arrived to look at our habits and imagine correctly that the landfill is not the best place for this stuff. Recycling is one answer but we can’t rely on everything being recyclable let alone recycled. We need to be educated and ask questions. For instance China no longer accepts the plastics they once did. The people living in China have had enough of being the worlds dumping ground and the government has bowed to the pressure. We see this as a positive step because it has made us become more educated on the realities of plastics. But we are a rarity among recyclers. Currently most companies collecting plastics other than water bottles, milk jugs and detergent bottles are sending the rest of the plastics to the landfill. The market for the remainder of these plastics no longer exists and rather than sort them in the labor intensive manner necessary to see them recycled they are on the way to the landfill with little to no fanfare. At Sedona Recycles we are fine tuning our processing so that we are able to do the necessary sorting to recover these plastics and see that they are truly recycled and not just diverted with the knowledge that unless it is remanufactured into something else it is not recycled.
To wean ourselves off landfills means to consume less, buy in bulk, buy products with little to no packaging and think long and hard about what we are buying and what we are discarding. We need to educate ourselves on what can be recycled and adjust our buying habits. We truly need to follow the idea of reduce and reuse first, and when that is done, recycle everything that you can. Buy products with post consumer content to keep the cycle going and support domestic manufacturing. The time is at hand when we can no longer dump our waste with a clear conscience. Now we know the consequences. It is no longer out of sight, out of mind. One day Graywolf will close and then what? Will another landfill have to open to take its place and another and continue thereby increasing the cycle of waste? Or will citizens aim for a world where landfills are not needed, where there is no such thing as waste.