Waste disposal and the polymer peril

S. Pathiravitana

There was a time when words like 'environmental' and 'pollution' rarely figured in our conversation. The reason, I think, is that at that time Colombo was known as the 'Garden City' and the streets of Colombo were, as they say, kept spick and span.

I remember when walking to school from Borella to Maradana (the old tram car route) there were Municipal labourers out early on the road sweeping and gathering the dirt and piling them into little heaps on either side of the road.

A cart followed behind them and a man shuffled the piles of dirt into the cart. Some days the streets were sprayed with water by a cart which had a yard or so long sprayer fixed across the bottom of its back. It meandered along the streets to the shopping areas trying to keep the dust from rising.

Looking at our streets today with mounds of dirt piling up at our street junctions, I recall what luxuries we had in times past when the Colombo Municipality was alive to its responsibilities.

There was an incinerator erected by a road appropriately named, I think, as Destructor Road somewhere in Layards Broadway and another at Kirillapone where, I presume, all that was collected from the streets of Colombo were sent for incineration.

At that time there was no complaint of the burnt dirt polluting the air with its smoke. That was when we knew nothing about pollution. Today, however, we seem to be at least aware that there is a thing called pollution.

The waste problem has now taken a different turn everywhere in the world and a turn for the worse. Curiously enough, wherever technological civilisations have come up, environmental degradation follows soon enough.

Don't be taken aback with this statement, for the fact is that the waste problem is complicated today largely due to the technological invention of what is known as 'a synthetic polymeric organic substance,' commonly referred to as plastics or polythene, which cannot be easily got rid of and is all over the world in various shapes and forms.

As a result, waste disposal in our modernised world has become quite a problem. According to a pioneer environmentalist, Dr. Barry Commoner, 'capitalist technologies are chiefly responsible for environmental degradation,' not that, to interrupt Dr Commoner, socialist technologies are any better.

Dr. Commoner is a biologist who was a Professor at the Washington University in his younger days. He is now 90 but still very visible. As an activist in the environmental lobby he protested in the late Fifties against the above ground nuclear testing in the Nevada desert.

To get his ideas across to a wider circle he ran for the presidency in 1980 from the Citizens Party. Global warming worries were then not in evidence. They were to come a decade or two later.

Meanwhile the American voter, like most voters everywhere who cast their votes more out of habit than out of reflection, did not heed the call of Dr. Barry Commoner. He got only 233,052 intelligent votes, just 0.27 of the total votes cast.

More thoughtful readers may find his book The Closing Circle very stimulating. He picks up four laws from the subject of Ecology which sum up most of what he has to say on how to save the earth from environmental degradation. This is how it goes: .

1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.

2. Everything Must Go Somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no "away" to which things can be thrown, he says.

3. Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such a change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.

4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. In Nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.

These pithily summed up statements add a lot of spice to his speech. His first law in ecology, for instance, takes me back well over 2000 years to a forest in Anuradhapura.

There, a Buddhist mendicant by the name of Arahath Mahinda surprised King Devanampiyatissa when His Majesty was indulging in his royal sport - hunting.

Addressing the King as "Tissa" he expounded to him in his own way shades of Dr. Commoner's first law in ecology:

"O great King, the birds of the air and the beasts have as equal a right to live and move about in any part of the land as thou. The land belongs to the people and all living beings; thou art only the guardian of it."

His second law of Ecology reminds us that in Nature there is no 'away' to throw 'waste'. What we see as 'waste' in a forest, for instance, is actually the soil enriched by the humus being formed on the ground by what we think is 'waste'.. Everything must go somewhere to make the environment whole. And by trying to order things as we want we only interfere with nature destroying its wholeness, or if you like the word, its holiness.

The mounting cost of waste disposal is the debt we have to pay for what we thought were free lunches that Nature has given us so generously. It is interesting to see how the US, by the life style it has chosen for itself, has incurred tremendous debts it now has to pay for imagining that it was only enjoying Nature's free lunches.

Did you know, for instance, that there are two man-made structures on earth that are visible from the Moon.

One is the Great Wall of China the other is Fresh Kills. Fresh Kills is the waste ground for New York City's trash which is taken away by barges 24 hours of the day delivering 14000 tons of trash every day.

And what constitutes this trash? The average person in the US would be surprised to know that he creates 4.39 pounds of waste per day and that his annual contribution adds up to a good many tons of trash a year.

There are other embarrassments for the US. Being the richest country in the world it is said to throw out every day 43,000 tons of food. That is a minor figure when compared to the 400 billion photocopies that are made in a year at the rate of 750,000 photocopies made every minute of the day.

The largest part of the waste stream in the US is the cutting down of 900,000,000 million trees every year for the paper industry. And from this paper four million tons is converted into just junk mail which invariably end up in landfills.

This is just a few statistics taken from a whole list published by the Clean Air Council, an institution set up in the States which has as its credo, Protecting Everyone's Right to Breathe Fresh Air.

When Dr Barry Commoner was asked by a newspaper on his 90th birthday how he adjusted his personal style to what was going on around him he responded saying that he doesn't get his shirts ironed and that for his dress he does not choose either synthetics or plastics.

In this set up it is heartening to know that our Government is about to launch a waste disposal project to counter the mounting polymer peril that is menacing us.

I gather this from a speech delivered by Dr Sarath Amunugama to a group of Government bureaucrats involved in this project: "The problem of lack of waste management in Colombo, Kandy, Galle and most of the major cities in the island, is now a very serious issue, which has a negative effect on the health of the public. If this is not solved we will see key sectors such as tourism affected adversely."

He stressed the urgency by framing a question, "Will any rational-minded investor," he asked "opt for a country that does not maintain high standards in the area of sanitation, health and waste management?"

So, there we are! If we do not attend to these problems, sooner than later, we are in for what the poet of the last century, T.S. Eliot, sang at the end of his poem to the Hollow Men :

This is the way the world ends

This the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper