Your holiday rubbish may cause environmental injustice
Photo: Jonathan Cutler
The past few weeks have been very busy. We hold parties at home almost every week. Usually, Diwali celebrations last for a month. The family invites other families to enjoy hearty meals, show off their beautiful saris, and the children sleep very late-I mean very late. Thanksgiving is approaching, and then we will usher in the New Year holiday in December. There are more parties in stock, and many people rush to the Whole Foods Supermarket.
Unfortunately, the party also invites full trash cans and a lot of food waste. This includes widely used plastic products. After all, Costco offers great deals on cheap plastic products that almost look like metal. The silver frame on the plate adds a touch of elegance. Plastic wine glasses, plastic “little wine glasses”, water in plastic cups, small water bottles… Large garbage bags can conveniently carry all this garbage from our big house to places we have never been. There is no upper limit to the number of trash cans. Any family can have one, two, three, four or even five. Millburn, where I live, is a very popular town. New York City’s prestige, good school districts, and well-connected communities have brought heavy taxes. Residents are responsible for paying taxes that cover garbage disposal services.
The ease of disposing of all this rubbish carries a big question mark of environmental justice. What opened my eyes was the documentary”Sacrifice zone“From the Ironbound community in Newark. My beautiful town is adjacent to the most pristine forest reserve. All these tons of garbage are shipped to Newark for incineration. Due to the increasing prevalence of carcinogenic pollutants in the air, residents there have been Incineration companies have been fighting for a long time. Recently, they held a protest to gather some momentum on this topic.
It is no coincidence that trash from predominantly white (65%) communities like Milburn is dumped in low-income communities predominantly inhabited by people of color.According to the new school Research, 80% of incinerators in the United States are located in income communities and/or communities of color.The article quoted Jeff Tittel, director of the Sierra Club of New Jersey, as saying, “The facility in New Jersey is located in the Ironbound area of Newark, not in Short Hills. The incinerator in Union County is located in Rawai’s only black community. , And the South Jersey facility is located in Westville, not Haddenfield.” Millburn’s voice is also increasing Local average Point out that Milburn’s garbage was burned only 10 miles away from us, so we are not free from the air pollution caused by garbage incineration.
The map shows that, compared with Milburn, Newark has a higher proportion of people of color and a lower level of high school education. Created by Radhika Iyengar using EJScreen https://www.epa.gov/ejscreen
The protests of the Ironbound community resonated with people Grassroots protests the U.S. has seen in the pastOne of the earliest records of the grassroots movement is the strike of black garbage workers in Memphis in 1968 demanding equal pay for equal work and better working conditions. Another landmark event was in 1979, when African American homeowners in Houston were working to exclude sanitary landfills. Middle-income communities in the suburbs. The first large-scale environmental justice movement was held in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982, when 500 people were arrested for PCB landfill problems. This is the first time that “environmental racism” has been created. The protests also led to the establishment of the Racial Justice Committee in 1987, which linked the location of waste facilities to demographic characteristics. Race, more than any other factor, determines the dump.In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many grassroots movements Fight against corporate polluters And the government is inefficient. It seems that we have not learned from these past events, but continue to be the perpetrators of injustice.
Waste incinerator in Newark. Photo: Kay Schreiber
What steps will help achieve environmental justice? Here are some ideas, some of which are already in progress at Millburn.
First, the town has started its own composting pilot, requiring residents to bring organic waste to township facilities. Residents can benefit from this initiative and reduce their waste.more here.
Second, residents can compost themselves by buying a ready-made composting device on the market, or pay companies such as Java Compost to use it.
Third, schools need to start composting and separating food in the cafeteria. Education is the key to understanding composting and its importance.
Fourth, schools should also teach environmental justice related to their communities. Simply composting without knowing the big picture is like putting a band-aid on a serious wound. here It is an example of a project on the environmental impact of schools led by New Jersey students.
Fifth, imposing a “pay as you go” tax on additional trash bins will make residents think twice about throwing away more trash.It’s already trying Other counties as well as. Maybe Mill could have taken the lead from them.
Remember, garbage disposal is never free. The cost may be your health or the health of other people.
These steps seem to be small steps in the right direction. But they are important steps to solve larger problems. Let us look at the bigger picture. Methane is a big problem. Methane comes from landfills, agriculture, and the energy industry, and is the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide.according to This article“Reducing methane is now the fastest and most effective way to slow down warming.” The article reports: “When methane enters the atmosphere directly instead of burning, it absorbs heat 80 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years. “
one COP26The most promising step is for 100 countries to join the alliance led by the United States and the European Union to reduce injected methane emissions by 30% by 2030. We can also reduce methane emissions at the local level while helping to create a more environmentally friendly society.
In order to build a socially and environmentally just society, we need to fully balance and reduce our emissions. It starts with each community taking more responsibility for the waste it generates.
