As it currently stands, Tufts is 17th in per-capita recycling among schools participating in the nationwide recycling competition "Recyclemania." With your support, we can step up our efforts and improve on our 16th place finish last year. Furthermore, whether we win or lose, we'll be helping the environment.
Though Tufts' Medford campus is relatively contained, we produce an enormous amount of trash. Over the past five years, garbage production on campus has consistently risen, yet our means of disposal have not kept pace with the increase in trash. Essentially, we are producing garbage faster than we can dispose of it.
Since we live in a consumer age wherein we manufacture disposable and hazardous materials for everyday use, waste disposal is particularly complex. This problem is not unique to our society, but it seems that as Americans, we have always had exceptional difficulty with proper disposal. Early settlers disposed of trash by tossing it into rivers and open-air dumps. In fact, it was not until the enactment of the Solid Waste Disposal Act in 1965 that America enforced environmentally sound garbage disposal.
Waste management today is one of the most innovative and technologically advanced fields. However, we also produce more trash than ever before. The average American disposes of five pounds of trash every day, and that number is only rising. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the United States generated 251 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2006. Municipal waste production is another figure that increases annually.
How do those numbers apply to trash consumption at Tufts? In a lot of respects, our figures mimic the national average. Our waste production has risen over 500 tons in the past four years. In the 2005-2006 fiscal year, the Tufts community produced 2805 tons of garbage - less than a third of which was recycled though 60 to 70 percent was recyclable.
While waste generation rates increase, collection mechanisms remain unchanged. In order to account for the rise in trash, facilities workers can do nothing more than empty bins more often. The process of trash collection involves many players - all of whom must work harder to accommodate the influx of trash - but most of the burden falls upon the janitors.
From the halls of our dormitories and buildings, trash is carried to one of 39 brown dumpsters situated around campus, which are emptied daily into an unassuming building behind East Hall: Central Heating. From this facility, where the trash is compacted into a larger dumpster, the garbage is trucked to a central waste management transfer station in East Somerville. The trash waits there until it can be loaded into an even larger truck along with other Somerville trash and taken to its final stop in Saugus.
Saugus houses the Wheelabrator waste-to-energy facility, an enormous incineration plant. After combustion, both top and bottom ashes are collected and sterilized. Noxious gases go through a rigorous series of cleansing processes designed to remove harmful particulates. The plant goes so far as to capture the heat energy, producing steam and thus generating electrical power - hence, "waste-to-energy."
Though this comprehensive process is designed to minimize environmental harm, incineration poses several concerns. Combustion is dependent upon non-sustainable and non-renewable fossil fuels. It is also important to consider that not all materials are combustible, and some produce harmful emissions when burned.
The largest environmental risks associated with incineration, however, are air and land pollution. While the gases leaving the plant are cleaner than originally, they are far from neutral and often introduce traces of mercury, heavy metals and dioxins into the atmosphere. Land pollution results ultimately from the disposal of ash densely concentrated with heavy metals and other toxins.
This sounds scary - and it is. But as our waste management facilities become more sophisticated, so do our techniques for elongating the life cycle of a product.
Everyone is familiar with the idea behind recycling: recapture certain elements of garbage and use them to manufacture new products. It may also be safe to assume that most people, especially the educational elite here at Tufts, know which materials are recyclable. Yet somehow nearly half of what winds up in our trash is recyclable.
What stands in the way of effective recycling? Though desirable, recycling poses its own set of problems, including the available volume of recycled materials, the promotion of the recycling process and economic factors. But the largest hardship lies in instilling an environmental ethic in the hearts and minds of the public.
Despite the hardships associated with recycling, it is essentially the only process by which we can create a sustainable waste system. Like most bad habits, ineffective trash disposal will only be alleviated by combining education, technology and politics, as well as economic and ethical incentives.
Weaning the United States and Tufts off of garbage addiction will require action and enforcement through collaborative efforts among policy makers, educators, businesses and engineers. Mostly, it will require each of us to take the time and expend the energy - and as this issue is not "disposable," we have a strong motivation: there is no other choice.
Yosefa Ehrlich is a sophomore majoring in psychology and environmental studies. She is an intern for the Tufts Recycles! program
