By Anonymous
Interactions
Waste has become routine in our daily lives. A mindless action for most, that has been ingrained into American culture. Because of this, I believe this composting bin allows individuals to become active citizens in our community, due to the bins allowing citizens to interact with the waste system and recognize trash is not aways this single use thing with a destination only to a landfill.
Resource characteristics
The resource system for the new bins located at Northern Neck would be the waste management system. In this system, the lifetime of a product/ products packing is considered, i.e. the material used, how long that material takes to break down, and the toxicity of the material. These aspects of waste management deal with natural resources, man-made material, and air. “Because U.S recycling was dependent on China for so many years, our domestic recycling infrastructure was never developed, so there was no economical or efficient way to handle recycling when the market disappeared” (Cho, 2020) This dependence has been the biggest down fall of the U.S. causing contamination making in near impossible for facilities to operate efficiently. This usually mean what meant to be recycled end up “being incinerated, deposited in landfills or washed into the ocean” (Cho, 2020)
Governance/user characteristics
municipality waste management systems are primarily involved in waste management, but not internally, especially because local government institutions resist regionalization of solid waste management. (Hickman, 1993) This is why in 2016 we saw “the U.S export(ed) 16 million tons of plastic, paper, and metals to China” (Cho. 2020) With this resistance, we sis an off shoring of our waste to other countries. This is also why with see private businesses like Teracycle created.
Social/Cultural/economic/political/pollical setting or related ecosystems
A major factor that plays a role in this system is cultural factors. Culturally we have blinders on when it comes to the production of waste. We only consider how the item we are using exist in our life but we don’t consider what happens after it has left our possession.
What can we do?
Culturally the new bins at Northern Neck could have a major impact on how we see trash. With this bin, it is now not just something that goes in a bin labeled trash or recycling, now the item is something that can be composted, what is recyclable must be sorted into glass or paper and bottles and cans. This slow steps towards better waste management allows individuals to learn about the complexity of waste management. Hopefully we can move towards a system like South Korea which “recycles about 54 percent of its trash, including 95 percent of its food waste” (Cho, 2020)
References
Cho, R. (2022, October 18). Recycling in the U.S. is broken. how do we fix it? State of the Planet. Retrieved November 9, 2022, from https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-america/
Hickman, H. L. (1993). Regionalizing municipal solid waste management. Ekistics, 60(358/359), 30–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43623674