landfills were invented within human memory. the trash can as we understand it is a 20th-century invention. disposability as a concept had to be invented. none of this is inevitable or necessary.

The common narrative here is "before landfills we just threw things any old place" and as such they're a "sanitary" invention. But this completely ignores that before the modern era, plastic didn't exist and metal was considered precious (and rightfully so–it's non-disposable, can be re-forged, and is procured under extraordinarily harsh conditions, often by slave labor or other lower-caste people).

Without metals, hazardous waste, and plastics, a landfill is a just a large compost pile.

I have this whole other train of thought about metals and mining. It feels like mining as a technology is a metonym for empire-building. Is Omelas made only of wood and stone?

anyway my ~~Liberal~~ solution to disposability is to mandate that all merchants must accept returns of any non-compostable goods they distribute, for free, in any condition or form and including packaging. If you deliver items in boxes to me you also have to pick those boxes back up.

And then, obviously, eliminate publicly-funded garbage collection for everything except compost. Would also need some stricter standards on what qualifies as "compostable" since a lot of that stuff is BS.

there are milk brands that sell their goods in glass bottles that the grocery store will give you $2 for if you bring them back and that's how everything should work. Like the whole system is fucked obviously but I think we could take some real stepwise progress to reducing this problem even in our current hell.

@clarity In Germany, literally every beverage bottle (occasionally plastic, overwhelmingly glass) is returnable to the store, and it’s fully culturally the norm you’ll return your few dozen bottles for the few euros bottle deposit refund

@lazerwalker yeah!!!! I've heard about this kind of thing being much better in some european countries. would love to see this extended to plastic packaging.

@clarity @lazerwalker

Britain had bottle deposit/return schemes tut they stopped when I was a small boy in 1970s. There are plans to restart them but this has dragging on for years. In recent times there is a lot more collection of scrap metal (which still has value), but plastic recycling lags behind (that said, a fair proportion of it does seem to be at least collected and sorted locally - there's a big depot near my work which does this which wouldn't happen if it just went to landfill..