Of course things are not like that, because while Costa Ricans produce 17 kg, the Spanish in 2020 reached 455 kilos .
The degree of industrialization can be measured by the amount of garbage that a country generates. The United States leads the list of major waste producers: it generates a third of the total despite the fact that its population barely reaches 5% of the world population. The increase has been exponential in the second half of the 20th century. If the United States has tripled its quantity since 1960, Spain is not far behind: in less than 7 years it has increased by 40% . If an alien were to rummage through urban garbage, he would discover that about 50% would be made up of paper, fabrics and packaging, 23% metals, plastics and glass, and 7% food scraps.
But garbage is also a business, and not junk dealers. Only the most cosmopolitan city, New York, spends 1,500 million dollars a year in managing its garbage , part in recycling it and part in taking it away from its surroundings, in barges that look for places to dispose of it. One of these sites is Pennsylvania, which receives a not insignificant payment for it. There the Covanta incinerator burns 200 tons of plastic a day. Of course, we also have dump countries. One of them was China, which bought much of the US garbage. But in 2019 it decided to cut its imports of low-quality plastic garbage, which meant that it cut the arrival of plastics by 99%. That was a hard blow for the United States and Europe, and that is why in Spain – the eighth country in the world that exports the most garbage – plastic waste in our landfills skyrocketed. Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines were also the final destination of European and North American waste, but since 2019 they have begun to return part of the plastics that reach their countries of origin.
The United States has found another place to put its waste: Latin America. The Dominican Republic, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia… are the tourist destinations of the American garbage, when those countries already have a real problem in managing their own. And it is that the problem of low quality plastics is draft. According to Greenpeace in Spain “about 50 million beverage containers are put into circulation every day, of which 30 million do not know where they go.”
Between paper, plastic and other derivatives, 60% of what occupies our rubbish bin is packaging. The shopping style of the 1970s, where the products were wrapped in newspaper and the bottle caps were returned, has passed a better life. The convenience of large surfaces takes its toll in the form of added garbage and the effort to have a more comfortable life has resulted in the volume of waste skyrocketing.
And not only that. We also generate waste when we build houses, roads… And not only because of the construction materials used, but also by removing earth and rocks. In the last 3,000 years, humanity has moved enough land and rocks to build a mountain range 100 km long , 40 km wide and 4,000 meters high, which makes the human being the main natural agent that modifies the landscape. The hypothetical mountain of removed material could seem insignificant next to any of the main mountain systems, but while orogenic movements have taken more than 10 million years to raise the Himalayas, humanity has developed practically all its “shaping” capacity in the last centuries. It has been in the last 5,000 years that the human being has become an excellent modifier of the terrain: suffice it to remember that the Romans came to pave nearly 300,000 km of roads. In the last three centuries, the total amount of earth removed has multiplied by 40, and the trend will continue in the near future.
Garbage has never been a problem for human beings: where it was generated, there it was thrown away. The first known landfill was at Knossos, where garbage was buried inside large pits. Athens was a city that had a law for garbage : it had to be abandoned in deposits located more than a kilometer from the city gates. Meanwhile, the Chinese were the first to dedicate organic waste to composting.
The problem of garbage grew as the size of the cities increased, until in 1185 a French law prohibited the unhygienic rite of throwing garbage out the window in Paris. And in the Naples of 1220, those who abandoned their rubbish in a place other than those designated for that purpose were punished with galleys or lashes. In 1506, the French King Louis XII created the Corps of Garbagemen . Garbage has always been a problem in cities.
The Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of the generation of waste on a large scale, with coal as the protagonist. Thus, from 30 million tons of world coal production in 1820, it went to 125 million in 1860 and 340 million in 1880. The gas necessary for lighting came from the distillation of coal, which extracted most of the volatile compounds trapped inside and turned it into coke. The yellow flame of coal gas lit up the streets of London in 1812 and made it possible to read the newspaper at home in 1829. But the distillation of coal produced a black, smelly and slimy residue generated during the process: tar. Completely useless, the distilleries dumped it into the nearest river or pond. In the mid-19th century, the Thames was so polluted that Parliament had to close because of the stench .
Since then the problem has only increased. And we’ve reached a point where, if we don’t remedy it, we’ll end up choking on our own crap.
