Hauling Trash

Alright, so waste management doesn't sound too exciting? Well, you're right and wrong. While the trash itself proves as appealing as attempting to spit on flies, the development and distribution of said waste is more important than most understand. To us regular Johns and Janes, the thought-process associated with "trash" is reduced to either the crap we see on daytime television or to a big black bag filled with disgusting "stuff" that we toss into some receptacle hiding out somewhere on our lawn or driveway.

After that, we forget about it. Just remember: it does continue to exist. Those garbage trucks aren't feeding the trash to black holes or blasting it off to the sun, it is being transported to your city's backyard. And that requires land. A lot of land.

Also, we can consider waste management, in many ways, an issue that humans chose to tackle within the past hundred years. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act passed in 1976, to give you a sense of how recent we considered laws to govern our trash!

What if this was your front yard?

Prior to these laws and discussions, our society had limitations on where it placed its trash. Without a place to store it all, such as landfills, the trash always accumulated in the same place anyone without a sliver humanity left in them would suggest: in the working class slums. They simply "pushed" all the trash towards the outer circumference of the city, where the lower classes lived (the higher social tiers lived nearer to the factories, the city centers, due to a closer commute). This caused innumerable deaths due to disease and infection from exposure to growing bacteria, dead carcasses of horses, dogs and pigs, and discarded chemicals.

Suddenly, the three R's (Reduce Reuse Recycle) coded into our brains in childhood comes to make sense, it haunts us, even. By investigating the past, we witness the consequences of the logic that runs contrary to this set of  moral and cultural assignations. 

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Trash is important. And even more important, where we put it and how we dispose or recycle it.

Yeah, we've come a long way.