How we got to where we are now 🗑️

Earlier in the week, I was reading old Times Union articles about the old ANSWERS incinerator / state garbage to steam plant that heated and cooled the Empire Plaza. I also got reading about old articles about the closure of unlined town and city garbage dumps, and what people were saying about burn barrels back in the day long before New York State banned them in rural areas. There was a time not that long ago before curbside recycling and large, lined mostly commercially owned or at least operated landfills. Trash was just trash – something you burned and you buried. It’s still how it’s viewed in many deep rural communities, on farms and ranches and remote homesteads across the country and in wilderness.

The other day, I was walking around the old ruins of the old tannery at Fox Lair. I am sure that it was used as a dumping ground for the Youth Camp and later Police Camp into the sixties when such buildings were burned and pushed into the ground by the conservation department. Waste was burned and what didn’t burn was pushed into the ground. It was a much simpler way to think about waste. Such things are not uncommon even to this day on larger farms and ranches, and rural homesteads, especially out west. For the most part, there isn’t that many chemicals that mitigate far from household and farm trash pits, assuming most of liquids like oils are burned off before being buried. The remote nature means usually pollution is localized and unlikely to impact anybody once it’s pushed underground and covered with dirt and rock – especially if it’s free of organic matter that can rot, collapse inward or produce methane. Deep buried trash pits can be farmed over top or forests can grow back over top, to be long forgotten unless of course someone starts to dig there. Cities are built on trash and debris, often pulverized brick and concrete from previous generations.

Love Canal, where Hooker Chemical buried a variety of industry byproducts from plastics and chemical manufacture, often dominates the discussion about modern waste disposal infrastructure, and the importance of methane collection to avoid air pollution and explosions and liners for leachate collection to avoid water pollution. Certainly a valid concern for large town or city-wide dumping grounds, likewise the importance of pollution control for large incinerators in urban areas, burning a cities’ worth of garbage including old television sets, computers, plastics and household chemicals. Significant amounts of waste material can be kept out of urban landfills and incinerators. But in the remote country, I am not sure if that all matters or is relevant.

I don’t buy the argument that modern trash is more toxic then generations before. A lot of the worse offenders that came on the market generations ago have been phased out, both voluntary and by government regulation. Modern large landfills and incinerators generally do due a good job at minimizing pollution, and the small scale trash burns and pits on farms and ranches might stink or be ugly, but are mostly harmless. The fear of chemicals pouring out of poorly run municipal and commercial dumps is real, though government regulation is controlling them. But the tiny amounts of pollution from the remote homestead should not be compared to that of controlled city emissions, as population density and area to absorb pollutants is much greater.