By Two & Out

Get that garbage out of here

Apr 27, 2018 | 10:52 AM

NO ONE IS HAPPY that children are discovering piles of used needles in our parks and green spaces.

And the principles of personal and social responsibility suggest adults, even if they are drug users, should be discarding their materials properly.

But the issue of used needles being wantonly thrown away doesn’t say as much about drug use as it does about our attitudes about garbage.

Drug users are just like the rest of us in so many ways, including in how they deal with their trash.

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Both individuals and society as a whole have yet to figure this out.

Used needles are more dangerous to the unsuspecting public than most other refuse, but it’s no less mindless an offense than discarding a cigarette butt.

Human beings are either too lazy or too uncreative to know what to do with our garbage.

The non-profit organization Plastic Oceans says 8 million tons of plastic is dumped in our oceans every year.

The amount of garbage that ends up floating in the ocean annually increases by an area 34 times the size of Manhattan.

And if we’re not dumping our trash into the ocean, we’re furtively burying it underground.

Landfilling is one of those practices we will look back at in 100 years and wonder who exactly we were trying to fool.

As if burying trash under a layer of soil magically makes it go away, the manifestation of the idiom ‘out of sight, out of mind.’

When you were young, did your parents let you throw garbage or dirty dishes underneath the bed?

That’s what landfilling boils down to.

Eventually, there will be a reckoning, and the garbage monster will come back to haunt us.

Reducing our use of disposable material is key to not making this problem worse, but we will still need to figure out a good place for all of our disposables.

I say, fire it into the sun.

You may think that’s a joke, but imagine if we harnessed our capital and imagination to develop an inexpensive and environmentally-friendly launcher.

It would allow us to access to the perfect incineration method for all of our garbage.

If Elon Musk, for example, tried to get garbage off our planet, maybe he wouldn’t have to concentrate so hard on trying to get people off our planet.