Alarmed by the rising tide of waste we are all creating, my family and I decided to try to make do with much less. But while individual behaviour is important, real change will require action on a far bigger scale.
One freezing cold morning, I drove past the outer edge of Denver, Colorado, past Buckley air force base, past the suburban neighbourhoods huddled at the edge of the Great Plains. I saw rising from the prairie several low bumps, lifting from the horizon like icebergs. As I got close to them, I saw they were encircled by barbed wire and knew I had reached my destination.
I pulled into the Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site, known as Dads. I was part of a tour arranged by a local reporter. Ten people gathered around our guide, Doc Nyiro, a Dads manager. Nyiro began by telling us that Dads is open 24 hours a day, six days a week. Every day, 800 trucks arrive, culminating in about 2m tonnes of refuse a year. We watched the trucks pulling into the weigh station. “It just doesn’t slow down,” Nyiro said. “Truck after truck.”
Climbing into a van, Nyiro took us to an area where a new cell was being constructed: the foundation for a new mountain of trash. It was 10 hectares in size and lined with clay and crushed glass to prevent the liquid that would gather as the rubbish breaks down from leaking into the groundwater. Once completed, the cell will be filled with waste, and would reach 90 metres high within two years.
Next, Nyiro took us to an active landfill area. We watched as a line of trucks stopped around us to empty out everything imaginable. “It looks like they just took all the contents of my apartment and dumped it here,” a man on the tour said. The wind whipped trash into the air like snow as 100-tonne tractors compressed couches and cookie boxes into thick strata that contain the full record of modern life. The result: a dry tomb of waste that will endure for millennia.
At the tour’s end, I couldn’t help but admire the landfill’s efficiency, the engineering that goes into managing so much waste. Dads enables the endless cycle of consumption of my city to go on uninterrupted while reducing the chances of immediate environmental harm. But not every place has the resources to manage such monumental waste. Ghana, for instance, imports around 15m items of secondhand clothing from countries including the UK, US and China every week. Many of these garments end up in informal dumps, which, after seasonal rains, wash out millions of rotting, tangled pieces of clothing on to local beaches.
