Heather Rogers describes the process of garbage collection and management in the US. The amount of waste produced has been increased. The average American generates an astounding 4.5 pounds of trash every day.
According to Rogers, the garbage is tucked away to either on the edge of the town or untraveled terrain for the disposal of waste material produced by people living in the town. If people saw it, they might start asking difficult questions. They are taken to the landfill operated by Geological Reclamation Operations and Waste Systems (GROWS).
The landfill is a carefully designed structure built into or on top of the ground in which trash is isolated from the surrounding environment. It is one of the primary disposal methods for many years because of the low cost. The landfill working face is a place where dumping takes place. The place is static whereas other parts in the landfill are in motion. There are trucks, earthmovers, machines, steamrollers, and water tankers. They are in motion to populate the bizarre land. These means of transportations are converting earth into the image of garbage.
Roger thinks that a waste management company like GROWS is aptly given the name because it is complex for the treatment of waste. It's growing as a new mega-fills that matched with the condition of garbage that has been growing in the towns in the US. It has high- tech, an incinerator, and a state-mandated leaf composting lot. It was the single largest recipient of New York City's garbage in Pennsylvania, a state that is the country's biggest depository for exported waste. The writer thinks the name has the connotation of the growth of the garbage. As the name suggests so is the situation of garbage's growth in the US.
There is a danger of the new state-of-the-art fills because it includes a cell that contains the trash. The cells are built on the top of the liner, it is a giant underground bladder intended to prevent contamination of groundwater by collecting liquid wastes and the rainwater that seeps through buried trash and channeling it to nearby water treatment facilities. There is a possibility of contamination of groundwater sites due to such toxic wastes coming out from liquid and rainwater.
Rogers points out that after the liners are expected to last for 30 to 40 years. The time span matches with the post-closure liability private landfill operators are subject to. So by then, the owner is no longer responsible for the contamination makes the public responsible for it after 30 years when the site is shut down.
According to Rogers, the repressed question not being asked is "what if we didn't have so much trash to get rid off ?" The question that aware us of the preservation of the environment is repressed. The question is pushed to the surface that can make us environmentally responsible.
It is so because garbage
production is crucial to a market economy. American capitalism hinges on our
willingness to keep producing trash.
Rogers states her thesis in the third paragraph: "If people saw what happened to their waste, lived with the stench, witnessed the scale of destruction, they might start asking difficult questions."
She places the thesis near the beginning of the essay so that the reader knows what to expect; the reader is prepared for the process Rogers is about to describe to be horrific. Because she suggests that people might "start asking difficult questions" if they were familiar with this process, the reader becomes prepared to ask themselves questions, and to think about what Rogers offers in the rest of the essay with a critical eye.
Rogers tries to create a dominant impression of the vastness of the problem with the ways she references the landfills' physical scale as well as the potential they have for environmental destruction. She does this successfully.
Rogers feels negatively toward waste disposal in general; she believes that the more technology created to help dispose of waste, the more the problem of waste production is pushed to the side.
Rogers feels even more negatively toward companies like Waste Management Inc., however, than she does about waste management as a whole. This is because of the way they function; they are able to make use of solutions that they know are ineffective in the long term but can avoid liability because of how these agencies are regulated. After reading her arguments, I share Rogers' feelings.
Her description of the landfill, while she clearly does have opinions about it, is objective. She describes the process using concrete descriptions of how these facilities function, including statistics regarding capacity and daily trash intake.
She is trying to make the reader understand that the amount of waste we are producing is a problem for the environment that cannot be fixed simply by changing the way we dispose of it. She does not believe that there are grounds for a waste disposal organization that functions similarly to the ones described to call itself "environmentally responsible". Rogers believes that producing less trash, to begin with would be the environmentally responsible solution.
Rogers does not need to offer a solution; that is not the purpose of her essay. Her purpose is to inform the reader of the realities of landfills and the potential harm they can cause; she wants to spread awareness.
The problems she is writing about are massive ones that cannot be solved by one person, and for people to be willing to band together to push for change they need to be aware that the problem exists first.
Hydraulic: powered by the pressure created by liquids in motion
Rejectamenta: trash
Sequestered: isolated, secluded
hydroseeded: covered with greenery as a result of a planting process that distributes seeds through a hose with water and mulch
butte: an isolated hill
aptly: fittingly
fetid: noxious, stinky
putrescence: a putrid substance
cascades: falls like a waterfall
leach: to seep
encapsulate: to enclose inside
palpable: plainly percieved
lavish: excessive
obliteration: destruction
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