by Hecate Kantharsis
Yeah, I'm crabby.
And I've been getting crabbier being on here and seeing posts about what comes down to wastefulness. Posts that seem to be looking for more ways to justify having more stuff.
So, I'm going to tell you what I've been doing lately. — Why this is bothering me so much. And, then, maybe, just maybe, instead of hopping on the defensive and doing their level best to tell my why I'm obviously so judgemental and holier-than-thou, people who have been accumulating things instead of experiences might rethink their lifestyles.
I am a geotechnical engineer. This normally means that I am concerned with things like retaining walls, foundations, roadbeds, basement slabs, drainage systems to prevent heave of said basement slabs, piles for support of tall buildings, spread footings, settlement of buildings…etc, etc. I'm sure you get the idea.
The material that I normally have to think about is soil. You know — dirt. The stuff you have in your garden, and the stuff without the worms that is underneath the topsoil, and the stuff with all the rocks in it that most in the Northeast have to get through when digging their wells, and the sand that is on coastlines. I have to think about the properties of these different forms of what is a naturally occuring material. Glaciers, volcanos, organic deposts, seismic activity, wave action, and other things create the soil. So, there is a lot of variety. But, it falls into a narrow band of categories and certain methods of practice have been developed for dealing with the stuff.
HOWEVER, I have been working on a couple of projects lately that are making me really, really angry on a daily basis. What am I angry at? The "soil". You are probably thinking "Huh?" and Can't be angry at a glacier…it just "is". An earthquake is not a thing with a brain. Same for weather.
Well, I'll let you figure it out who I am angry at.
One job involves COPR (Chromium Ore Processing Residue) waste. 800 acres (eight hundred!) of it. From 17 to 35 feet deep. Taking an average depth across the site of 26 feet, that means we are talking about 33,557,333 cubic yards of waste from making stainless steel, tanning leather, and dyeing things and painting stuff chrome green, chrome oxide green, chrome yellow or molybdenum yellow. And other uses. {Edited to add: If you can think of a concrete truck — just to give you an idea of the volume I'm talking about here — a typical concrete truck has a 13 cubic yard capacity. So this is 2,581,333 concrete trucks. At a typical length of 22' for a concrete truck, that means a parade of concrete trucks 10,755.5 miles long. (5,280 feet in a mile.) Actually longer as if they are moving, you need a little space between each one. So, let's say a line instead of a parade.}
And this is just one waste site of this stuff. There are others around the country and the world.
The other job involves a solvent for cleaning stuff that got into ground water. And mercury — so much mercury that soil samples from 75 feet down have "free mercury" in them (quicksilver, that silver stuff that used to be in thermometers). And an extremely saline environment (more saline than sea water). All this mercury got into the ecosystem and soil from a demand for the industrial processes that could bleach paper and a demand for a solvent to flush rocket engines. The war machine is a mighty polluter, too.
This solvent is so nasty that just to run a few tests in our lab, I need to be dressed in "Level C" like this: http://www.ahrq.gov/research/devmodels/devmodtab3.htm (Level C is the second photo from the right.)
So, if I've recently read you the riot act about consumption, maybe you can understand where I'm coming from. And, maybe, you'll give some thought to the long chain of goods, resources, industrial processes, and pollution that go in to making that absolutely-must-have, it-is-so-cute THING that you are thinking of buying.
And, by the way, if you want to buy the stuff, you should also be willing to live on top of the brownfield or Superfund Site. Personally, I think that whenever we buy something, we should have to take home all the waste from the creation of whatever it is. The shavings from making a wooden spoon would be a lot easier to deal with than the waste from making one of those teflon soup ladles. Then people might change their minds about what is "cheap" and "affordable".
I do. Live on a brownfield, that is. My neighborhood was once the power yards for the coal coming in to burn for electricity.