Tuesday, July 28, 2015

How you live -- hazwaste

Today's question started me wondering if we mightn't be better off mining our landfills and increasing our investments in recycling. Have you looked at any of the documentation for the proposed PolyMet NorthMet mining project? Have you noticed the ratio of waste to ore ("... the metal content is roughly .75%, combined , for copper, nickel, and various precious metals.")? We throw away and abandon too much, too quickly. I have doubts we can last until Star Trek technology saves us.

abandoned farm house
abandoned farm house
Photo by J. Harrington

What facilities in your area accept universal hazardous waste?

Chisago County lists Hazardous Waste Disposal Sites and the Items Accepted / Rejected at the County's household hazardous waste facility. The county's web page adds a very nice touch by providing information on where to dispose of items, such as ammunition and automotive batteries, not accepted at the facility. Of the four EPA-listed universal hazardous wastes, all are accepted at the county facility or listed in the county's information of disposal sites.

abandoned shed
abandoned shed
Photo by J. Harrington

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, in partnership with metropolitan counties, provides for hazardous waste from commercial generators. The nested hazardous waste management framework, from federal, through state to county, seems to fit fairly well with the bioregional tenets for

Governance
  • Bioregion governance is autonomous, democratic and employs culturally- sensitive participatory decision-making processes.

  • Political and cultural legitimacy are measured by the degree to which a steward achieves social and ecological justice, and ecosystem-based sustainability.

  • Intricate networks of federation will be woven on continental, hemispheric and global bases to ensure close association with governments, economic interests and cultural institutions in other bioregions.

The Waste Carpet

By William Matthews 
No day is right for the apocalypse,
if you ask a housewife in Talking
Rock, Georgia, or maybe Hop River,
Connecticut. She is opening a plastic bag.
A grotesque parody of the primeval muck
starts oozing out. And behold,
the plastic bag is magic;
there is no closing it. Soap
in unsoftened water, sewage, asbestos
coiled like vermicelli, Masonite shavings,
a liquefied lifetime subscription
to The New York Times delivered all at once.
Empty body stockings, limp, forlorn,
like collapsed lungs. A blithering slur   
of face creams, an army of photocopies   
travelling on its stomach of acronyms,   
tooth paste tubes wrung rigid and dry.   
Also, two hundred and one tons
of crumpled bumpers wrapped in insurance   
claims, slag, coal dust, plastic trimmings,   
industrial excrementa. Lake Erie is returning   
our gifts.

       At first she thought she had won   
something. Now it slithers through the house,   
out windows, down the street, spreading   
everywhere but heading, mostly, west.   
Maybe heading is the wrong word,
implying shape and choice. It took
the shape of the landscape
it rippled across like the last blanket.
And it went west because the way lay open   
once again: not the same fecund rug
the earth grew when white people scraped   
their first paths to the Pacific
across the waves of the inland grasses.

Outside Ravenswood, West Virginia,   
abandoned cars shine in the sun
like beetlebacks. The ore it took
to make the iron it took to make the steel   
it took to make the cars, that ore
would remember the glaciers if it could.   
Now comes another grinding, but not—
thanks to our new techniques—so slow.   
The amiable cars wait stilly in their pasture.   
Three Edsels forage in the southeast corner   
like bishops of a ruined church.
There are Fords and Dodges, a Mercury   
on blocks, four Darts and a Pierce Arrow,
a choir of silenced Chevrolets.
And, showing their lapsed trademarks   
and proud grilles to a new westward   
expansion, two Hudsons, a LaSalle
and a DeSoto.

       I was hoping to describe
the colors of this industrial autumn—
rust, a faded purple like the dusty
skin of a Concord grape, flaking moss-
green paint with primer peeking   
blandly through, the garish macho reds   
insurance companies punish, the greys   
(opaque) and silvers (bright), the snob colors   
(e.g. British Racing Green), the two-tone   
combinations time will spurn like roadkill
(1957: pink and grey), cornflower
blue, naval blue, royal blue, stark blue, true
blue, the blacker blue the diver sees
beneath him when he plumbs thirty feet—
but now they are all covered,
rolling and churning in the last
accident, like bubbles in lava.

And now my Cincinnati—the hills   
above the river, the lawn that drained
toward Ricwood Ave. like a small valley of uncles,
the sultry river musk that slid
like a compromising note through my bedroom window—
and indeed all Cincinnati seethes. The vats
at Proctor & Gamble cease their slick
congealing, and my beloved birthplace
is but another whorl of dirt.

Up north near Lebanon and Troy and Rosewood,
the corn I skulked in as a boy
lays back its ears like a shamed dog.   
Hair along the sow’s spine rises.
The Holstein pivots his massive head
toward where the barn stood; the spreading stain
he sees is his new owner.

What we imagined was the fire-storm,
or, failing that, the glacier.
Or we hoped we’d get off easy,
losing only California.
With the seismologists and mystics
we say the last California ridge
crumble into the ocean.

And we were read with elegies:

O California, sportswear
and defense contracts, gasses that induce
deference, high school girls
with their own cars, we wanted
to love you without pain.

O California, when you were moored to us
like a vast splinter of melon,
like a huge and garish gondola,
then we were happier, although
we showed it by easy contempt.
But now you are lost at sea,
your cargo of mudslides and Chardonnays
lost, the prints of the old movies
lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods
snuffed in advance. On the ocean floor
they lie like hands of a broken clock.

O California, here we come,
quoting Ecclesiastes,
ruinous with self-knowledge.

Meanwhile, because the muck won’t stop
for lamentation, Kansas succumbs.
Drawn down by anklets of DDT,
the jayhawk circles lower and lower   
while the sludge moils and crests.

Now we are about to lose our voices
we remember that tomorrow is our echo.   
O the old songs, the good days:
bad faith and civil disobedience,
sloppy scholarship and tooth decay.   
Now the age of footnotes is ours.
Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid.

While the rivers thickened and fish   
rose like vomit, the students of water   
stamped each fish with its death date.   
Don’t let a chance like this go by,   
they thought, though it went by   
as everything went by—towers   
of water flecked by a confetti   
of topsoil, clucked tongues, smug   
prayers. What we paid too much for   
and too little attention to,
our very lives, all jumbled
now and far too big in aggregate   
to understand or mourn, goes by,
and all our eloquence places its
weight on the spare word goodbye.


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Please be kind to each other while you can.

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