One of the most demanding urban art forms is to prop an empty Slurpee cup on top of an overflowing trash can. This takes an expert hand.
Place it at just the slightly wrong angle and your cup will fall off the heap with a plunk, and you'll feel foolish for having tried so hard. Yet you can't cram it in without toppling the other trash. No one wants to hold onto the cup and walk around the block in search of a half-full trash can.
You could place the cup on the ground next to the trash can. The garbageman may pick it up and take it away. Or the wind might carry it around the corner. Does it make a difference whether the cup winds up in a landfill or on the streets? Either way it will never be put to any use. It's just more trash.
And there's a lot of it. According to Zero Waste America, an online environmental research organization, in 1990 Americans generated 269 million tons of municipal waste, an average of 1.089 tons per person. But we also recycled 8 percent, bringing the total disposal down to 247 million tons, or 1 ton per person. By comparison, in 1997 Americans generated 340 million tons of municipal waste, which averaged 1.272 tons per person. The recycling rate had risen to 30 percent, for a total of 238 million tons, or 0.890 tons of waste disposed per person. That's just under 4.9 pounds per day.
Municipal waste includes durable goods, nondurable goods, containers and packaging, food wastes and yard waste. But that's not the end of it. A lot more than that can wind up in municipal landfills, including municipal sludge, industrial nonhazardous waste, construction and demolition debris, agricultural waste, oil and gas waste, mining waste and hazardous waste.
Here in Nevada, the state's Department of Environmental Protection notes that the amount of total solid waste generated in the state has steadily increased in the last 10 years, "significantly exceeding the state's population growth rate in the 1990s." Recycling rates in the state have stayed relatively flat for years, hovering between 10 and 15 percent (Clark County has fluctuated between 8 percent and 13 percent).
Interestingly, between 1999 and 2002, the state actually imported more solid waste than it disposed of through recycling or export to other states, a trend likely to continue. Nationwide, the U.S. EPA estimates the total cost of municipal waste disposal is $100 per ton. Therefore, the cost of "municipal" waste disposal in the U.S. could be as high as $23.8 billion, which does not include the associated financial costs of lost resources or the costs of landfills and incinerators on public health and the environment.
Waste not, want not. We're sensitive to waste because, though we don't think about it or talk about it, we're aware that it is everywhere. And it's not just municipal waste. America is an exuberantly throwaway society, and while this condition has given rise to the skyscrapers and the endless percolations of pop culture, it has also given us no shortage of terrain in which to find waste.
We waste money (one think-tank estimates total pork-barrel spending in the 2005 budget at $27.3 billion). We waste talent (American Idol, anyone?), we waste water (turn those sinks off while brushing your teeth) and we always find a way to waste time. We waste words, good food and good intentions. Neighborhoods waste away, as do people, and nuclear waste piles up—hopefully not at Yucca Mountain. Gas-guzzling SUVs waste precious fuel as they maul through cities, carrying one passenger at a time.
Is there a way to determine how much we waste in total? Maybe not. Waste is so ubiquitous we don't really see it anymore. It's become not just the thing itself—the products we throw away, the buses churning around the city with nobody on them. It's receded into the very field of our vision —that there are products at all that must always be thrown away.
Nevertheless, as wasteful a society as the United States seems to be, it nevertheless makes efficiency a cardinal virtue. Wireless Internet and phones and cable television connect us immediately to the outside world. Nonstop flights get us around the country in hours, and usually on time—provided there's no snow at O'Hare. Everywhere you look, someone is hawking a product or service based not only on its utility but its efficiency. Web browsers search faster. Fed-Ex delivers the next day. The infrastructures that undergird our lives are models of efficient operations. You might not think that the next time you're stuck in rush hour, but interstates can take us from one end of the country to another, and electrical, water and sewage systems reliably work as advertised.
This country delights in calculating efficiency in every conceivable way. I recently read that obesity costs the regional economy of Pittsburgh a billion dollars a year. Who calculates these things? The exuberance of America is at every turn challenged by its own belt-tightening, save-a-buck notions of competitive productivity.
Every time you sit down to a giant buffet at the Aladdin or the Rio, it's as if you can see both at once. That so much food can be cooked and served in the course of a day requires an incredible degree of preparation and precision. I can spend five minutes chopping up a single onion, and in my clumsy way, each cut of my knife always seems to present the risk of cutting into a finger. At the buffet, there is none of this. Just giant vats making insane amounts of food all the time. And I'm not complaining. The food is good, and cheap. But as much as I see efficiency here, I see waste, in the heaping leftovers that remain on the table; in, I don't know, the very idea of the buffet, which depends on faith in the notion that More is Good.
The tension between waste and efficiency, this battle between the way things are and the way things ought to be, often plays out most immediately at work. The more anal among us spend as much time organizing our desks as we do getting any work done on it. I waste time organizing so that I may save time doing more efficient work later. In which case it's not really wasting time but—what?—investing it? That's what I tell myself. Old papers pile up and I throw them away or recycle them. And yet, I usually find that my best work comes not when I have organized my papers and folders exactly where I like them on my desk, or have all my files carefully set up on my computer, but when papers are strewn all over the place. That's when intuition kicks in, and we remember where the one important paper is buried inside a wobbling stack.
Most of us would agree that waste is undesirable. Not many of us spend much time pondering or visiting those complex systems that take our waste away. And yet, it is fascinating, too. In its trashiness and ugliness, in its decay, waste symbolizes nothing so much as failure, in the way grand schemes so often come to naught. This is the feeling of driving past some unofficial dump in a city where late-night drivers dispatch heaps of old tires, appliances and furniture. But in the sheer size and weight of all that we throw away, there is something empowering, too. It's the spare-no-expense school, where integrity, loyalty, vision are communicated by just how much you are willing to throw away. To watch a casino fall to implosion is exhilarating not only for the visual fireworks, but for the overpowering hubris of it. You imagine some other visionary, from 20 or 30 years ago, telling his financiers and the county officials that he will spare no expense to erect a grand casino. Then someone like Steve Wynn comes along to obliterate that vision and everything that went into building it, to make way for something even grander.
Waste is also strangely liberating. What marks the modern condition as much as anything else is a desire for freedom to break the past into a thousand pieces, toss it all away and begin again. To walk through shattered neighborhoods or derelict industrial sites or down-at-heel business districts is to feel disappointment at their demise and yet a subterranean happiness, perhaps harkening back to childhood, when the satisfaction of building with toys was equaled only by destroying what had been built and opening the process of making something new again.
Waste is part of the process by which we discard our old skins and remake ourselves, and the world around us. And so is creativity. This is an ongoing, second-by-second process. Perhaps the reason why waste is so primal, so essential, is that it is very closely bound up with creativity. Creativity is at the center of being human. Outside of love, this play of coaxing gold from the baser materials is probably the best thing humanity has going for it. And it's a hugely wasteful affair.
This is especially clear in the arts. A sculptor starts with a block of marble and has to chip much of it away to create her work. Photographers shoot rolls of film to capture one simple shot. We writers, meanwhile, work through many drafts until we feel vaguely satisfied. Countless versions are printed and discarded. There's really no way around this, only through it. A first draft of anything is almost a guaranteed stinker, and while that may not be so bad, there being no trees to grind for paper, no rejection letters to receive in the mail, there is not much quality to savor, either. In this light, waste is a prerequisite to creating work that lasts. Its absence ensures the creation itself will be a waste. Either way you can't escape waste.
And this process turns out to be, in its own way, somehow efficient. Well, maybe that's a stretch—a newspaper on deadline, despite all the best organizational planning, is rarely an efficient organism, and yet in its crazed warblings, its last-minute fires that must be put out, its last-minute facts that must be checked or changed, its crunch-time calls that must be made to people who have inconveniently left town or turned off their numbers—all of this begins to acquire its own kind of crazy logic. Efficient? Maybe not—and yet, whether it's a newspaper or any big project facing any firm or company, the job somehow gets done.
With all that waste, floating through the air, and underground, and on the streets, in our cityscapes and in our thoughts and dreams, it's a relief to come upon a garbage can just before the tipping point, when, with a little dexterity, a little Jenga-like concentration, you can position your piece of trash on top of the pile and leave the problem, the thinking about it, to someone else.
Conversely, what a disappointment to realize that a trash can is truly, demonstrably, beyond capacity—beyond its beyond-capacity—and that you have to truck across the street, or halfway down a strip mall, to find another one that, you hope, is still trash-placeable. And there are plenty of corollaries to this frustrating moment, like trying to stuff a trash bag into a Dumpster, or down the chute in an apartment building, or squeezing carry-on into the overhead bin of an airplane. It's the same desperation to get it in there no matter what, because if you can't, somehow everything will crash down around you. Yet perhaps it is only at those moments when we are most alive to the possibilities of re-creating what that "everything" really is.