Diem Le
Title: Material Remains; The Perpetual Challenge of Garbage
By: Robin NagleDate: October 25, 2013
Garbage is one of the oldest and most vexing of human creations. Small-scale societies frequently relied on natural scavengers to make their discards disappear, but when trash accumulations grew too troublesome even for that convenient symbiosis, the entire community often pulled up stakes and moved. Ancient cities dealt is now one of the most urgent challenges of contemporary life.Garbage is a predicament of maintenance, regardless of context. The conundrum is especially acute in cities, where individual aggregations quickly multiply into great piles of trash.
Title: Material Remains; The Perpetual Challenge of Garbage
By: Robin NagleDate: October 25, 2013
Garbage is one of the oldest and most vexing of human creations. Small-scale societies frequently relied on natural scavengers to make their discards disappear, but when trash accumulations grew too troublesome even for that convenient symbiosis, the entire community often pulled up stakes and moved. Ancient cities dealt is now one of the most urgent challenges of contemporary life.Garbage is a predicament of maintenance, regardless of context. The conundrum is especially acute in cities, where individual aggregations quickly multiply into great piles of trash.
Solutions from a century ago focused on materials such as wood, ash, textiles and organic wastes, but radically new materials and compounds in many of today's commodities need fresh thinking. Electronic waste, prolific and finely wrought, has not yet been met with large-scale environmentally sensitive processes of discard and recycling. we have only recently become aware of the pernicious effects of plastics, whether measured in ecosystems or in the bodies of human beings, and we have yet to understand the consequences of plastics' endurance. Even if all plastics manufacture stopped today, unknown millions of tons of it would last for unknown centuries into the future.
After I read this article that I chose, I learn that refers to the mechanics of burning trash at home but the basic notion of transforming garbage into fuel is not new. I am often impressed when contemporary activists and policy makers take on the deeply rooted complications of garbage. It was true that some initiatives from the past were unsuccessful or were better suited to another era (consider that few, if any, U.S. cities still field complaints about basement piggeries or accumulations of horse manure in the streets), we have much to learn from our forebears and from the progression of thinking about waste management over time.