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.
Read more about this topic: Zero Waste
Famous quotes containing the words significance of, significance, dump and/or capacity:
“It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.”
—Calvin Coolidge (18721933)
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)
“To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910)