When thinking about what the world will be like in fifty or more years in the future, climate change and population may be the top two. Garbage should be in the top ten. Northern Illinois is mostly flat except for the hills and mountains of garbage dumps. Many communities have used old quarries as dumps so the millions of tons of waste have little or no mound. Others have made the mountains of garbage into winter skiing and sledding sports areas. Pontiac, Illinois could put rocks up one side of their mountains for people to practice for the Mt. Everest attempt. Their height is only realized when seeing a garbage truck weaving back and forth up the sides of the mountains.

New York City used to (may still) dump their garbage in the ocean. Back in the 1980s, I saw a documentary about NYC loading their garbage onto trains and shipping it to Ohio dumps. About the same time, I saw where California was dumping old tires. Instead of recycling them, they had piled them onto a quarry gouge in the side of a mountain. Will we continue to build more Pontiac size dumps or fill more quarries to get our waste products out of sight?

The Texas size plastic island in the Pacific Ocean gets lots of press but the Atlantic Ocean has two large ones and the Indian Ocean has one, too. These plastic islands may have a lifespan of forever and will continue to grow long after we solve the problem of dumping plastic into our streams and rivers. Two noted examples are in the circulation in the North Pacific. After the earthquake and tsunami destroyed several cities and towns in Japan, the backwash was filled with debris. It has circulated around to Alaska, Washington, and Oregon shores. Another was the container of sneakers that washed off a container ship coming from China. Shoes are still washing up on our shores. It may take a few more years, but what is left will end up as part of the Pacific island of plastic.

Some cities have done away with recycling programs because no market exists for the materials. Since the Chinese are no longer taking our cardboard waste, it is going into the dumps. In an ideal world most of our trash and garbage would be recycled, but Americans in particular have never adopted the practice without regulations and laws. If we don’t develop recycle economies and composting food wastes, we can anticipate hundreds more leaking mountains and garbage pits as our population grows.