We get up in the morning and throw away huge bags of garbage to be taken by the waste management departments. Perhaps, this is the first thing we all do to make our home clean. But do we ever think for a moment how to destroy all that, or where to place it, when people don’t have a place to live in? Of course, that’s not our headache, for a special department is there to bother about it. But the fact is that in the process of making our little home clean, we pollute our larger home, our own environment.
We are really far away from understanding the seriousness of environmental pollution. Martin O’Brien is the author of A Crisis of Waste? Understanding the Rubbish Society. He urges the government and common people to consider the matter. We need to understand what the statistics on waste actually tell us, and work accordingly. Awareness among citizen is also required to minimize the household waste. Our landfill sites will be completely full within a very short period, say within the next eight to nine years. But recent statistics say that it would be full even earlier that that. So what next? Now days of easy waste disposal are over and it seems households need to mine their own waste for potentially valuable resources and then deliver these for exploitation by private companies.
The sad thing is that, every government is planning to find out ways to develop markets for waste: to make it easier for private companies to trade waste for profit. It’s not a sort of environmental awareness, but a thought of marketization of waste that is driving us to consider that matter. Because of this, big plans are made but all in vain- just to increase the complexity of household waste management. Recycling has been increased, but we can do even more than that. Why not reuse the materials in stead of exporting it to distant land.
The problem of waste materials has been largely ignored, both by the government as well as by us. We should consider it from the environmental point-of-view. Then only we can minimize the fast-increasing bulk of garbage on the earth.
Source: guardian