Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 22, 1990 TAG: 9004190512
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Beth Macy Staff Writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Plastics are no big deal.
That's rubbish, you say?
Not really, according to University of Arizona archaeologist William Rathje, a man so widely quoted on the topic of garbage that people call him a "garbologist."
Rathje has been looking at garbage fresh out of the can since the early '70s, forming a research team called The Garbage Project.
For the past two years, the team has dug into seven landfills: two outside Chicago, two in the San Francisco Bay area, two in Tucson and one in Phoenix.
All told, they exhumed 16,000 pounds of garbage, weighed every item they found and then sorted it all into 27 categories and 162 sub-groupings.
And Rathje has literally unearthed some surprising truths about the garbage crisis. As he writes in the December 1989 issue of Atlantic Monthly: "Americans are wasteful, but to some degree we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as more wasteful than we truly are - and certainly as more wasteful than we used to be."
Here are some other common fallacies about waste:
\ Myth: Fast-food packaging and disposable diapers strain the capacity of the nation's landfills.
Actually, only about 0.1 percent of the landfill's contents by weight consisted of fast-food packaging.
Less than 1 percent of the contents by weight was disposable diapers. And the entire category of things made from plastic represented far less than 5 percent of the landfills' contents by weight and only 12 percent by volume.
\ Myth: Paper degrades rapidly in landfills.
"During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating back to 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast," Rathje writes.
Telephone books and newspapers make up 10 to 18 percent of the contents of a typical municipal landfill by volume. Overall, paper accounts for 40 to 50 percent of everything we throw away, both by weight and by volume.
\ Myth: Plastic is dangerous to the environment because it doesn't biodegrade.
Not so, says Rathje. Plastic products, while they take up lots of space in our kitchens, are compressed flat before being buried, taking up little overall landfill space. And plastic, because it's inert, doesn't leach toxic chemicals into the environment.
\ Myth: Environmentally conscious consumers should buy the new biodegradable plastics.
In this case, "biodegradable" means that a degeneration agent, usually cornstarch, is added to the plastic to cause it to break into tiny plastic pieces - not decomposed matter.
The plastic pieces that remain contain more volume than nonbiodegradable plastic because items made with biodegradable plastic have to be thicker to compensate for the weakening effect of the cornstarch.
by CNB