Significance of Dump Capacity
Many dumps are currently exceeding carrying capacity. This is often, mistakenly used as a justification for moving to Zero Waste. Others counter by pointing out that there are huge tracts of land available throughout the USA and other countries which could be used for dumps. This is no more of an argument against the need for Zero Waste than is the former an argument for Zero Waste. The underlying need to move to a society designed along Zero Waste principles arises from the huge waste of resources that is inherent in poorly made, short-lived articles and production processes. The locus of the most egregious wasting takes place as articles are built and processes are run wastefully. The actual placing of a now useless item in a dump is barely the icing on the cake, in terms of the waste it represents. Poorly conceived proposals, that appear with a dismaying regularity on the Internet, to blithely destroy all garbage as a way to solve the garbage problem, make use of the common delusion that it is the garbage itself which is the problem. These proposals typically claim to convert all or a large portion of existing garbage into oil and sometimes claim to produce so much oil that the world will henceforth have abundant liquid fuels. One such plan, called Anything Into Oil was promoted by Discover Magazine and Fortune Magazine in 2004, even though it absurdly claimed to be able to convert a refrigerator into "light Texas crude" by the application of high pressure steam. Zero Waste analysis, which is long on scientific results and short on spectacular claims, receives no such promotion by the media.
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“It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For a parent, it’s hard to recognize the significance of your work when you’re immersed in the mundane details. Few of us, as we run the bath water or spread the peanut butter on the bread, proclaim proudly, “I’m making my contribution to the future of the planet.” But with the exception of global hunger, few jobs in the world of paychecks and promotions compare in significance to the job of parent.”
—Joyce Maynard (20th century)
““... It’s a day’s work
To empty one house of all household goods
And fill another with ‘em fifteen miles away,
Although you do no more than dump them down.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light—I call it a divine capacity for lightness.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)