Blog 5

                In chapter 2 of Recycling Reconsidered, MacBride mentioned the Mobro 4000, a ship containing trash that had to sail around for months before finding a place to get rid of the garbage. This reminded me of Leonard’s story of the ship, the Kiain Sea, in the Story of Stuff reading about disposal. In that story, the ship loaded with ash sailed for almost a year around the Mediterranean, dumping about 4,000 of its 14,000 pounds of cargo in Haiti and then finding nowhere else to dump the remaining ash. It came to be discovered that the ash had been eventually dumped overboard in the middle of the ocean before the ship finally landed, empty, in Singapore.  But I noticed that MacBride never talked about how the Mobro 4000 eventually got rid of the trash onboard; also she mentioned that the incident was due to public relations rather than landfill capacity issues without elaborating on what that meant. I found an article that described the incident in more detail though:

                With increasing regulation of landfills, tipping fees at the landfills, particularly along the East coast, began to skyrocket. As a result, inter-state trash transport became common as companies tried to send trash to landfills in states with more sparse populations and cheaper land, and thus cheaper tipping fees. A mob boss working with Long Island’s trash had arranged to ship Islip’s trash to a cheap landfill in Louisiana to make a sizeable profit. The ship, however, set sail before an agreement had been officially reached with the landfill, and an alternate plan was made to drop the trash in North Carolina instead. Because of earlier problems with mob members shipping hazardous waste in the guise of normal trash, though, the trash was refused from the North Carolina dump. Word spread, and for multiple months the ship could not find a place to land and dump the garbage because everyone was too worried that it contained hazardous waste. Eventually, the ship returned to New York and the trash was all burned in Brooklyn.

                Since neither of these instances had to do with a lack of available places to discard the waste but rather a wanting to not accept the disposal of the dangerous waste, I think it goes to show how the current waste problem that we are facing is more than just the fact that our waste output is unsustainable. Even if we could go on burning trash and dumping the ash or non-incinerated garbage into landfills, people don’t want that waste to be accepted in their own areas. And if we don’t want this stuff disposed of near us, we shouldn’t expect others to want or willingly accept its disposal near them. It is simply another example of why we need to create better methods or expand upon existing methods of both disposing of waste (recycling, reusing, composting, etc.) and preventing waste in the first place (extended producer responsibility, better manufacturing and production processes, smarter consumer shopping and product usage habits, etc.).