NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN: Garbage as our alter ego
“That's the whole meaning of life ... trying to find a place for your stuff” — George Carlin
Ultimately, the problem of waste cannot be fathomed without recognising the order of capitalism, which is built on the relentless production of commodities and the philosophy of planned obsolescence, in which goods are built to have short shelf life.. The “golden age of capitalism” is thus also the “golden age of garbage.” Just between 1960 and 1980, solid waste in the U.S. increased by four times. The exponential growth in garbage the world over has rendered the Pacific Ocean awash with plastic particles thus making plastic outnumber zoo-plankton at a shocking rate of 6:1
The iconic American comedian, and that brilliant dissector of the human condition, George Carlin, had in a 1986 sketch about “The Stuff” shown us how our tendency to acquire more and more stuff — material commodities — generates great anxieties about how and where to store them. Even your house is not a home, but “a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.” What Carlin did not tell us, at least in this sketch, is that much of the stuff does not find a place, it ends up as garbage: as waste, trash and refuse. If there is one thing that is symptomatic of the modern human condition, but hardly recognised as such, it is garbage. Garbage is capitalism’s dark underbelly, its pathological alter ego. That is why we keep disavowing it, refusing to believe it exists.
But the more we deny it, it rears its ugly head, as most recently, in Vilappilsala panchayat in Kerala where the standoff between the local people, who are opposed to the reopening of a waste treatment plant, and the State has left 2 lakh tonnes of solid waste lying unprocessed, threatening an environmental disaster. It is, therefore, remarkable that the current boisterous debate on foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail in India has completely ignored the question of garbage. By focusing only on the supposed virtues of waste reduction in perishable goods (like fruits and vegetables) brought about by the better storage facilities of retail conglomerates, the issue of the latter’s humongous ecological footprint (for example, in terms of sprawl, increase in driving, and the proliferation of non-biodegradable waste) has been bypassed.
According to a report from The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Washington, D. C., in the 20-year period from 1990, the same period in which Walmart grew to be a behemoth, the average number of miles that a U.S. household travelled for shopping increased by around 1000. And from 2005 to 2010, despite Walmart’s initiation of a reduced waste programme, its reported greenhouse gas emissions shot up by 14 per cent. Big-box stores don’t just improve efficiency in consumption, they also increase consumption manifold, which ultimately results in phenomenal amounts of trash. The garbage generated by Americans annually reportedly amounts to 220 million tonnes, and 80 per cent of U.S. goods are used only once before being trashed.
In the mythologies of modernisation and development, we sing paeans to skyscrapers and nuclear plants. But there is no accompanying dirge about the costs we have had to pay for them. If there was, then we would have heard of Puente Hills — the largest active landfill/waste dump in the United States, which is a 1,365-acre monstrosity — as much as we have about the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building. It is ironical, Edward Humes tells us in his book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, to call Puente Hills a “landfill,” for the garbage mountain has long ceased to fill a depression in the land and rises now an unbelievable 500 feet above the ground, a space capable of holding 15 million elephants. It takes, of course, a gargantuan effort, as Humes describes, to keep the toxic substance that leaks out of the 130-million tonne waste (which includes 3 million tonnes of soiled disposable diapers — another “important” invention of modern life) from poisoning groundwater sources... Read more:
