Transcript AMERICAN WASTE © Athena Tacha 2009
Slide 1
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 2
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 3
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 4
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 5
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 6
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 7
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 8
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 9
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 10
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 11
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 12
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 2
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 3
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 4
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 5
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 6
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 7
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 8
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 9
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 10
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 11
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)
Slide 12
AMERICAN WASTE
© Athena Tacha 2009
food.
But after WWII, with fast developing technology and affluence,
consumerism exploded, starting a tremendous proliferation of
waste.
Disregard for the natural environment went
along with prosperity:
more and faster highways, with huge cars and
trucks guzzling cheap gasoline and emitting
pollution in the atmosphere and ground water.
Who wanted public transportation or trains?
And why not two or more cars,
one for each family member,
with a new car every year,
dumping the old one and
filling the countryside with junkyards?
Why not have a TV in each room, and upgrade them frequently?
Since the 1980s, computers, cell phones,
ipods and endless other electronic gadgets
are purchased and discarded in vast
quantities – not to mention the billions of
CDs and DVDs that don’t disintegrate and
will pollute the Earth forever.
In 2000 alone, Americans generated almost 250 million tons of solid waste
(expected to increase 20% every five years) – much more than any other country.
The average American household generates about 7 lbs. of solid waste per day.
Some 15% of American waste is incinerated (with dubious
emissions), and less than 20% is supposedly recycled. The
rest is buried in landfills or just dumped illegally.
But it takes energy, labor
and money to make new
products from recycled
ones. It’s much simpler
to cut down trees for new
lumber or for the
incredible amount of
paper used, and wasted,
daily.
Production of cheap plastics is a great American contribution to the world.
The food industry consumes much of them:
Stores sell prepared foods, vegetables, fruit and water in plastic containers.
Plastic cutlery, glasses and plates prevail in most cheap restaurants and cafeterias – and
now even on airplanes. (If not plastic, it’s styrofoam or paper.)
The recent chic is plastic or surgical
gloves worn by food store
employees and airplane
stewardesses!
The medical industry has become one of the largest producers of waste:
disposable syringes, gloves, hats, shoe-covers, paper-sheets, robes, masks,
diapers, you name it – in masses!
The next most wasteful industry may be packaging. Forests are decimated
mostly for lumber, but paper and cardboard are also voracious consumers.
In theory boxes and paper can be recycled, but what about the endless foam peanuts
and bubblewrap, styrofoam packaging, miles of plastic tape, and trillions of plastic
bags?
From its start in Oregon 38 years ago, recycling legislation is moving slowly.
Meanwhile waste accumulates exponentially.
Los Angeles alone has 10 landfills, with 90 more in the surrounding area.
Puente Hills in Whittier, CA, the largest in the USA, accepted 4 million tons of waste in 2005.
New Yorkers generate 26,000 tons of trash
per day, some of it still going to the infamous
Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
Every New York corner displays mountains of
bagged garbage almost nightly – but as
many bags adorn illegally the countryside.
Huge quantities of waste end up in the oceans whose currents circulate it.
Industries and cities empty toxic sewage in rivers and the sea; boats and monstrous
cruise ships routinely dump their trash in the water.
Fish and other ocean life ingest our trash and
chemicals,
and many die trapped by our
The 1.375 billion tons of waste produced yearly by the U.S. livestock industry could
be converted into manure for the land, instead of contaminating the waters.
But there is no satisfactory solution for the 279 million
tons of hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste –
half of it “wastewater managed in treatment units.”
With Yucca Mountain, NV, contested, 60,000 cubic
meters of radioactive nuclear waste have been
buried the last decade in a Carlsbad, NM,
repository. Will it be secure from earthquakes and
leakage?
Americans are not just wasting or endangering the Earth’s resources – forests, oil, or
water. U.S. cities are using lighting and air-conditioning to an extravagant degree.
And the digital age is going to increase enormously the demand for electricity.
True, an average car trip to the library uses 4,500 times the energy of a Google search
(0.2 grams of CO2), while a page of newsprint consumes 350 times more energy.
Yet from 2000 to 2005, the total electricity used by data centers in America has doubled,
and in 2009 data centers worldwide consume annually more energy than all of Sweden.
As with nuclear energy, the U.S. has exported a new “product,” and waste,
to the entire world and the future…
Narration by
Athena Tacha
© 2009
Images mainly from Google and the Wikipedia
(L.A. highways, photo Kalavinca; New York trash bags, photo A. Tacha)
Not a fish story – or is it?
In 1986, the city of Philadelphia contracted with a waste-disposal firm to get rid of 28 million pounds of toxic ash
from the city's municipal and industrial incinerators. The disposal firm, in turn contracted the Khian Sea's ship
owner to dispose of the ash, which contained such toxics as aluminum, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury,
nickel, zinc and dioxins.
After wandering the Caribbean for 18 months in search of a disposal site, the Khian Sea travelled across the
Atlantic. In November 1988, two years after it left Philadelphia, the ship showed up in Singapore, holds empty, its
cargo dumped somewhere en route. (The National Voter, Feb. 1989, p. 5)