Yesterday’s Trash: The Town of Tomorrow
In one of his well known illustrations, Jesus told the listening crowds of his day that a city set on a hill could not be hidden. His point was about the abundantly obvious: a prominent community cannot help but broadcast messages about its culture, in the same manner as beacons guide travelers in choosing what to follow and what to avoid. Ironically, there are cities of varying sizes today built on the top of towering refuse heaps, such as the infamous ones of Calcutta and Mexico City. The messages of these particular communities are overt but a great deal of the planet’s cities hold lesser known tales.
Other cultures are more subtle about the fact that mountains of discard and ruin lie beneath their cities. Mankind has often chosen to build cities in layers, covering the ruins of a past with a sheathing of new structures and usages. In Europe, it is not uncommon for a tired tourist to sit down and rest on a stone wall jutting above the earth’s surface by a foot or two, an indication of ancient Roman days. In the New World, there are old street surfaces being uncovered and restored to the original stones that were left by ships unloading ballast as they took on rice and cotton to re-cross the Atlantic. Coastal colonial towns used their refuse as part of landfill projects to push back the tides and build wharves and fortresses.
Detritus has been a mainstay in civilizations’ building techniques since the time of Ur, regardless of how materially affluent or simple the community may have been. Archaeologists and historians try to piece mysteries of the past together by dig findings but some remain impenetrable to their understanding. There are mounds in different parts of the world that still defy interpretation, leaving these specialists in a quandary as to whether this structure had ceremonial significance or it purpose was primarily that of a dumping ground.
This makes one wonder what future interpretations may result from unearthing the mounds of this era which are today’s landfills. Aside from the typical uncovering and identification of housewares and personal items, there will surely be an additional furrowing of the scholarly brow. “What is the meaning of this extraordinary accumulation of fetid plastic-skinned paper product that keeps turning up?” And when they rightly conclude that they have been building their kingdoms of glass and steel upon depths of adult diapers, what will be the anthropological statements?
Statistics tell us that nearly 10% of today’s household trash consists of diapers. Some claim that baby diapers make up about 3% of that total; adult diapers adding up to the remaining 7%. At the time of this writing, that particular adult diaper stat seems a tad exaggerated. But there is no doubt that with the tail end of the baby boomers quickly shifting into their senior years and with their life expectancy on the rise, this adult diaper figure will soon be surpassed. Currently, diapers are the third largest source of landfill waste. It stands to reason that as the bottoms these nappies serve get bigger in both size and number, the bigger their allotted landfill space will need to be.
An aluminum can takes about 200 years to completely break down under typical landfill conditions. Shockingly, an adult diaper takes the same amount of time, more in some calculations, to disintegrate under the same circumstances. Oxygen is a key element for decomposition to take place and well maintained landfills ironically starve the garbage of this necessary ingredient. To manage the putrid nastiness of a landfill and to keep the public’s health as shielded from their trash as much as possible, many landfill sites try to apply a six inch layer of soil over the top of daily dumpings. This oxygen depriving burial and compacting works in tandem with public health efforts to keep oxidizing water out and leachate in, and leads to what is known as “dry tomb effect”. Refuse is inadvertently mummified, making for fascinating future archaeology, especially when considering the inevitable density of adult diapers that will be encountered.
“Brownfield” is the ecological term for a fallow landfill site before it is cleaned up – how appropriate when considering the diaper element. Brownfields become the mounds upon which expanding cities are built, today and long into the future. The press of urban life and its real estate requirements eventually dictate that developers turn the soil and turn a buck. Planners’ designs make it possible to completely ignore the history of the compacted detritus of broken hair dryers, rotting sofas and adult diapers that lie beneath. They dutifully follow the real estate maxim that location is everything: Everyone knows that if you want a great view, build on a hill.