COMMUNITY
WANDERING WASTE story by Rebecca Santana Illustrated by Maria Blokhina
Everyone’s talking about trash these days, and most of those conversations focus on how to produce less of it. But it’s not so easy to reduce how much waste you produce. If you have trash, you just throw it away. It’s not something most people keep track of. Unfortunately, the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality doesn’t work when it comes to waste because everything we throw away goes somewhere. Alachua County produces anywhere between 600 to 900 tons of garbage every day, according to Shelly Samec, a waste alternatives specialist. All of that garbage is collected from homes, businesses, apartment complexes, etc. and is taken directly to the Leveda Brown Environmental Park and Transfer Station for sorting. Any waste that ends up in a garbage can goes straight to a landfill. There is not enough time or manpower to sort through the thousands of pounds of trash this facility processes daily. The trash sits in big piles until it is pushed onto truck beds for out-of-county transportation. There are no active landfills in Alachua County, which means we have to transport our garbage elsewhere. Long-haul trailers go back and forth about 40 times a day to move all the trash that comes through. Our trash goes to die a long and smelly death in landfills. Piled up pounds of trash create a low-oxygen environment. This can inhibit decomposition, meaning our trash piles up for years and years. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the slow decomposition of these garbage heaps creates methane, a greenhouse gas linked to global climate change. Recycling is a little more involved. It goes beyond just chucking a bottle into a green bin. “Everything has to be bailed by type in order to be sent off to be recovered into new materials,” Samec said. But nonrecyclables always sneak into those green bins, slowing down the process. Products like styrofoam, black plastic and take-out
52
orange&blue magazine
THE LEVEDA BROWN ENVIRONMENTAL PARK AND TRANSFER STATION
