Solid Waste

Plastic bottles amount to 0.3 percent of the nation’s solid waste.  Accordingly, taxing and banning plastic water bottles in workplaces isn’t going to matter in terms of overall waste.

And the fact that plastics don’t biodegrade doesn’t matter, since in a landfill, not much of anything degrades. Landfills are intentionally designed to prevent degradation—to keep the waste intact so that decay does not create problems associated with gases and liquids produced by decomposition. In fact, during the early 1990s, University of Arizona archeologist William Rathje found that there was little or no decomposition of materials placed in landfills. He even found 40-year old newspapers that were still readable and intact food products, including lettuce. (See: Phil Brown, Interpreting Garbage Archaeologist Finds Surprises in Landfill, Albany Times Union, December 7, 1989, B1.)

In addition, some people say we need to reduce use of the plastic bottles because we may soon run out of landfill space. Yet this claim is also unfounded. It was originally made in the 1990s when Congress considered solid waste legislation. At the time, journalists and government researchers reported that existing landfills would close in five to 10 years, and then we would have no where to put our waste. But that is true at any point in time, because landfills last only that long, and new landfills would replace the used up space. There was at the time—and still is—plenty of space for landfills. During the alleged landfill crisis, A. Clark Wiseman of Gonzaga University pointed out that, given projected waste increases, we would still be able to fit the next 1,000 years of trash in a single landfill 120 feet deep, with 44-mile sides. Wiseman’s point is clear: Land disposal needs are small compared with the land available in the 3 million square miles of the contiguous United States. (see: A. Clark Wiseman, U.S. Wastepaper Recycling Policies: Issues and Effects, Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1990, 2.)

Problems arise when states fail to permit new facilities. Yet while it is often politically difficult to find sites for these landfills, it is not impossible. Landfill companies have found ways to compensate communities for hosting landfills and hence have been able to continue to provide sufficient landfill space. In fact, new landfills are now designed to be much larger and last longer.

And the public health risk of modern landfills is close to nil. According to one study conducted by academic researchers Kenneth Clinton and Jennifer Chilton, modern sanitary landfills pose a theoretical one in 10 billion risk of cancer for someone exposed to the chemicals for 70 years. This risk level is so low is it unfathomable, especially when you compare it to the much higher risks associated with things we consider relatively safe in every-day life. For example, smoking 1.4 cigarettes during one year, traveling 300 miles by car, traveling 10 miles on a bicycle, living two days in Boston, and eating 40 tablespoons of peanut butter over a year’s time each pose a theoretical risk of one in a million—making these relatively safe activities far more dangerous than depositing anything in a modern landfill. Jennifer Chilton and Kenneth Chilton, “A Critique of Risk Modeling and Risk Assessment of Municipal Landfills Based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Techniques,” Waste Management and Research 10, 1992: pp. 505–16; and
Richard Wilson, “Analyzing the Daily Risks of Life,” in Readings in Risk, ed. Theodore S. Glickman and Michael Gough, Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 1990, p. 57).