In the San Francisco Chronicle, catering company owner Ari Derfel was profiled for his unusual quest to collect a year's worth of his personal trash to demonstrate how much waste a person creates in one year.
Derfel is now in his last month of collecting trash and ended up with about 96 cubic feet of waste.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans generate about 250 million tons of solid waste a year. As Derfel points out, "When we throw something away, what does 'away' mean?...There's no such thing as 'away.'" because "Each thing we throw away has been produced somewhere, shipped to a store, entered the home, and then is sent somewhere else - using up water, oil and land."
Do you think pollution and the subsequent event of global warming is a legitimate and/or looming threat? If you harbor concerns about the environment, will this affect who you vote for in the elections (based on their environmental platforms, rather than other factors)?
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2 comments:
If the EPA has already told us that we generate 250 million tons of solid waste a year, then why did Ari Derfel go on his "unusual quest" to only find out that he made 96 cubic feet? Sounds like a huge waste of time that ultimately doesn't mean anything to anyone. It's like "Supersize Me." We all know that Mcdonalds is bad for us, we don't need a guy to hit us over the head with it by eating for a month and throwing up. We know that we make a lot of garbage per year; we don't need some guy to catalog his life and then expect anything to change about how we live our lives. This isn't a solution to anything.
Well, I suppose it just kind of drives the message home. Like how "Supersize Me" caused McDonalds to take out their supersized option, MAYBE this individual collecting all of his garbage will help people to try wasting a little less. I think global warming and pollution are very legitimate threats, and they probably will factor into who I vote for in the next election.
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