Editors’ note: this article also contains the story “Garbage Through the Ages: A Brief History” which ran as a sidebar to the cover story on November 11, 1988.
The ride today is anything but comfortable, because my seat is really a dozen burlap bags piled on top of one another, and every time the front loader comes back down after hoisting cargo to the truck’s rear, it lands with a great clanging jolt that causes the whole cab, including driver and passenger, to surge into the air.
“We’ll see if it works,” he says. “If does we could get maybe $50 for it. But even if it doesn’t, there’s electrical parts in there that are potentially reusable. And there’s small amounts of gold and silver in some of these old computers–just a few dollars worth but it’s reclaimable stuff.”
Ken Dunn is the director of the Resource Center, headquartered at 6217 S. Kimbark. Every week he and his 32 employees are involved in the collecting and processing of 500 tons of garbage–26,000 tons a year–from 17 neighborhoods and cities, including South Shore, Hyde Park, Beverly, Oak Park, and Oak Lawn. Instead of burying or burning the junk, Dunn and his cohorts extract aluminum, steel, glass, and paper from the mess and sell it at a profit to companies that recycle the materials.
In sheer material output, no one can hold a candle to the United States. From the diaper on the newborn infant to the plastic bottle dripping an IV solution into the comatose senior citizen, American life is awash in disposable products. The throwaways include hundreds of newfangled gadgets our ancestors never even imagined: safety razors and blades, ballpoint pens, milk cartons, plastic dishes and utensils, aluminum cans, reams and reams of computer paper, even use-and-toss cameras. Experts say a 1988 American throws away 100 times as much material as did a person living in the mid-1800s.
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Last year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the nation produced 160 million tons of solid waste, which averages out to 1,300 pounds a person, or about 3.5 pounds for each of us every day of the year. This represents an 80 percent increase during the last 25 years alone. Much of this material has a considerably longer life span than you do. The Styrofoam cup that held this morning’s coffee will still be around 300 years from now–in 2288!
The spirit of NIMBY precludes shortcut burial solutions. Rhode Island passed a law closing its dumps to out-of-state garbage and even posted state troopers at the borders to intercept would-be smugglers. With dumps dwindling, New Jersey was forced to begin trucking household wastes to rural areas in the south, some 500 miles away. Philadelphia carted garbage all the way to Panama. Illinois enacted laws restricting new landfill development and demanded that the most populous areas come up with comprehensive waste-management plans that avoid landfill by 1991.
