Background on Waste Disposal
For a long time, human beings have always wandered to explore a safe and proper method of garbage disposal. Looking back into the past, it is seen that the first city dump was established in ancient Athens, and the government of Rome had started the assortment of municipal trash by 200 C.E. Even as late as the 1800s, it was noticed at worst that garbage was rampantly thrown out into the streets of U.S. cities or piled up into rivers and ditches. Garbage, in enlightened communities as well, might have been taken to foul-smelling open dumps or burned in incinerators where it used to create clouds of dense smoke around. After a long quest for a safe method of waste disposal, experiments on systematically covering the garbage in dumps started in the early 1920s. The first "sanitary landfill" was started in Fresno, California, in 1937. It is now reported that more than 60 per cent of the solid waste in the USA is disposed of in landfills, and the production of waste seems to keep growing. According to the Energy Information Administration, the amount of waste produced in the US has dramatically increased in the past three decades, estimating that the average American generates 2.04 kilograms of trash every day.
Some important words in the essay:
Dump: a place where waste or rubbish/garbage is taken and left
Landfill: an area of land where large amounts of waste materials are buried under the earth
Incinerator: a container which is closed on all sides for burning waste at high temperature
Liner: a giant underground bladder intended to prevent contamination of groundwater by collecting leachate and channelling it to nearby water treatment facilities
Working face: the place where dumping takes place
Leachate /ˈliːtʃeɪt/: liquid wastes and the rainwater that seeps through buried trash
GROWS: Geological Reclamation Operations and Waste Systems
Early in the morning, heavy steel garbage trucks roll slowly forward along neighbourhood collection routes. A worker empties each household's waste bin into their rear compaction unit. When the rear compaction unit is full, trucks move to a garbage depot - "transfer station" - to unload the waste and later from there the waste is again taken to a recycling centre, an incinerator or to a sanitary landfill. Because of cheaper means of waste disposal and sufficient land in North America, land dumping has been a favourite disposal method for a long time. Most of the garbage from city areas is carried to the landfill located in rural areas.
Nowadays, garbage graveyards are created far away from the residential area. They are covered with thirty-foot-high fences and are also high-tech. Dumping sites are intentionally kept on the edge of the town and kept hidden from the general public. Major waste disposal corporations think that if the public actually knows what is going on there, they might create problems by asking several difficult questions. Waste Management Inc., the largest rubbish handling corporation, operates its Geological Reclamation Operations and Waste Systems (GROWS) landfill outside Morrisville, Pennsylvania, to manage rubbish. When we move our eyes around by sitting on the flat part of a 300-foot-high hillock of rubbish, we are surprised to know the eating and throwing habits of the Americans.
Several trucks, earthmovers, compacting machines, steamrollers, and water tankers have made the place strange and unreal. Those machines moving and working up the "working face" in slow motion through the earth are changing the place into the image of garbage. Many seagulls (sea birds) fly over and come down to eat rotten waste. The metals underneath the foot pop up tearing the ground. Similarly, other wastes like potato chip wrappers, plastic bags, old shoes, etc. come through the dirt. The smell these all spread is sickly and sour.
GROWS landfill is a 6,000-acre garbage treatment complex. It includes a second landfill, an incinerator, and a state-mandated leaf composting lot, and is one of the waste burial sites often referred to as "mega-fills". These are high-tech, high-capacity dumps. There are several earth-covered cells at GROWS that can cover ten to one hundred acres across and can be up to hundreds of feet deep or tall. Up to 2002, GROWS remained the single largest dumping site to manage garbage in New York City in Pennsylvania which is the country's biggest depository for exported waste.
The place where, in the previous century, Warner company used to mine the area for gravel and sand to make cement in its factory in Philadelphia is now being used by WMI to fill with fifty million pounds of waste from the city every day. Twenty-ton dump trucks gather and discharge stinking garbage on the working face; the landfill compacting machines crush the rubbish by moving back and forth. However, one cannot get any bad odour if he passes by the landfill. In new state-of-the-art (advanced) landfills, the place is kept very tidy with the help of a thirty-five-foot-tall fence; paper pickers are deployed to retrieve any discards carried off by the wind. Small misting machines spray the invisible chemical-water mixture into the air and that mixture binds with odour molecules in the air and pulls them down to the ground. Moreover, in such advanced landfills, with the help of cells built on top of the liner, around 100,000 gallons of leachate is collected and sent daily to nearby water treatment plants so that groundwater will not be dangerously poisonous causing devastation.
When cells are filled with trash after many years, they are capped. After that, layers of clay mixed with fabric, synthetic mesh, and plastic sheeting are spread across the top of the cell and joined with the bottom liner ensuring no leakage. Today's regulations have made landfills less dangerous than they used to be in the past. Even with such caution, these systems are not a permanent solution to the garbage problem because the liners will not last forever; the life of the liners is expected to last between thirty to fifty years only. After this time frame, landfills are closed. Thereafter, private landfill operators remain no longer responsible for contamination; instead, the public is.
What is more striking than the public's uncovering of some illegal activities at landfills is the advanced technologies required to destroy rubbish. Each landfill is an expensive and complex operation that uses the latest and safest waste management methods.
No matter how advanced or environmentally responsible the operation is, the more repressed but serious question to consider is: What happens if we produce less waste?
Comprehension
1. According to Rogers, why are landfills "tucked away, on the edge of town, in otherwise untravelled terrain" (3)?
According to Rogers, landfills are created on the edge of town or out of residential areas to keep them hidden from the public. She believes that if the public knew what happens to their waste, they would "start asking difficult questions."
2. What is the landfill's "working face" (4)? How does it compare with other parts of the landfill?
The landfill\s "working face" is the place where garbage is dumped, then spread and compacted. This is the active part of the landfill. Most of what remains is previously processed trash.
3. Why does Rogers think that the GROWS landfill is "aptly named" (5)? What connotations do you think Waste Management Inc. intended the name GROWS to have? What connotations does Rogers think the name has?
Rogers thinks that "GROWS" is a suitable name because of our careless habits. Due to the heavy amount of waste production, the number of landfills is surprisingly and rapidly growing day by day. WMI's likely to intended the name to have positive connotations. GROWS is a mega-fill, which is considered fairly high-tech. It is possible that the company intended to allude to the idea of growth through progress. Rogers, on the other, believes that the name alludes to the growth of a problem.
4. What are the dangers of the "new state-of-the-art landfills" (9)? What point does Rogers make about liners being "expected to last somewhere between thirty and fifty years" (11)?
Landfills are places that emit poisonous liquid wastes. The wastes on the landfill are controlled by synthetic liners to keep them from seeping into the soil and contaminating groundwater but these liners have a life expectancy of 30-50 years only, after that the landfill operators are not responsible for any problems caused by their landfills.
5. According to Rogers, What is the "repressed question" (13) that is not being asked?
The repressed question is "What if we didn't have so much trash to get rid of?" She urges us to be more conscious of our waste products because it would be the single solution to get rid of garbage.
Purpose and Audience
1. At what point in the essay does Rogers state her thesis? Why do you think she places the thesis where she does?
Rogers states her thesis in the third paragraph, i.e. "If people saw what happened to their waste, lived with stench, witnessed the scale of destruction, they might start asking difficult questions."
She puts her thesis statement closer to the beginning of the essay with the goal that the readership knows what to expect, and the readership is prepared for the process Rogers is about to describe as horrific. It is because she suggests that people might start asking difficult questions if they were familiar with the process, and the reader becomes prepared to ask themselves questions and to think about what Rogers offers in the rest of the essay with a critical eye.
2. What dominant impression does Rogers try to create in her description?
Rogers attempts to create a prevailing impression of the immensity of the issues with the ways she references the landfills' physical scale as well as the potential they have for environmental destruction. She does this effectively and successfully.
3. What is Rogers's attitude towards waste disposal in general - and toward disposal companies like Waste Management Inc. in particular? Do you share her feelings?
Rogers does not seem to be positive toward waste disposal in general because she believes that the more technology is there to dispose of garbage, the more the problem of waste production is pushed to the side. Furthermore, she seems even more negative towards companies like Waste Management Inc. though she basically talks about waste management in general. Why she feels is because of the way they function. The solutions that they employ are ineffective in the long run and yet they can stay away from the obligation on account of how these companies are regulated. Considering these all matters, I stand with Rogers' feelings.
Style and Structure
1. Rogers begins her essay with a description of garbage trucks collecting trash. What specific things does she describe? How does this description establish the context for the rest of the essay?
In her introduction, Rogers has described the trash collection in a way that feels familiar. This thing must have been witnessed by the reader. What she wants to mention here is that although we produce a large amount of waste, we do not often think about what happens to it. She has tried to make the experience feel like a personal and relevant one by creating a scenario the reader can recognize their role at the start of the essay.
2. What determines the order in which details are arranged in Rogers's essay?
Rogers structures the details by moving step-by-step through the garbage disposal process. She has started with the collection of garbage to the transfer station and then capping a cell. After that, she ends it with a reflection on the implications of this process.
3. Is this essay a subjective or objective description of the landfill? Explain.
Her description of the landfill is objective; however, she has her opinions there, too. She describes the process using a concrete description of how these facilities function, including statistics regarding capacity and daily trash intake.
4. In paragraph 13, why does Rogers put the phrase environmentally responsible in quotation marks? What impression is she trying to convey?
Her intention behind the phrase "environmentally responsible" is to make the readers realize the fact that we cannot simply solve the problem of waste production just by changing the way we dispose of it. She does not seem to be convinced that disposal organizations have any solid base to claim that they function similarly to the ones described to call themselves "environmentally responsible". Rogers believes that producing less trash would be the only environmentally responsible solution.
5. Rogers never offers a solution to the problems she writes about. Should she have done so? Is her failure to offer a solution a shortcoming of the essay?
Yes, Rogers has not offered any solutions since it is not the purpose of her essay. She basically wants to inform the readers of the realities of landfills and the possible harm they can cause. Through her essay, she wants to spread awareness among the readers. The problems she has mentioned in the essay are massive ones that cannot be solved by an individual, and for people to be willing to band together to push for change they need to be aware that the problem exists first.
Vocabulary Projects
1. Define each of the following words as it is used in this selection.
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