Trashy parks and feelin’ manly

Sometimes being wasteful just feels sooo good … doesn’t it? Crushing a measly plastic water bottle in your hand. Slamming that gum wrapper on the asphalt. Drinking from Styrofoam cups. It’s just so … dangerous. Living life on the wild side sure has its draws. Until you see your very first landfill or take your first swim in the Pacific with someone else’s old Doritos bag. I saw a landfill with my own eyes for the first time when I was in Israel. There, the state digs these massive craters in the sand, then covers the piles of garbage in more dirt so that when you look out from the highway you see what look like brown Leggos bigger than US air force base hangars.

An old landfill near Tel Aviv, commonly called "Shit Mountain"

As you learn what exactly it is that you are looking at, you start to picture this reality:

Common landfill image, though this one happens to be from the UK

In researching these lovely photos, I came across some info on what exactly is to become of that Tel Aviv landfill, formerly called Hiriya. Apparently, this guy Eli Cohen uses biological organisms to digest trash and turn it into other useful things and guess what … it works. One blog says he has a ton of environmentally friendly sanitation sites in Israel, one being Hiriya. MSNBC, meanwhile, ran a story on Hiriya and a video that features some guy talking about all the changes.

In the next decade or two, that massive Leggo of trash (I promise, from the road it really resembles a big Leggo) will in fact be a national park! Now maybe I don’t want to go rolling around in trash pretending its a park, but I would sure rather look at something that appears to be a park than stare at Shit Mountain. So riddle me this: why is it so hard for other businesses or governments to adopt similar methods for more efficiently getting rid of human waste?

Back from the motherland

Last week I travelled to Jerusalem (literally, where my mama came from) and took note of all the things the country is doing to conserve energy (as well as all the places it could do better). Some things are so logical–why don’t we do them here?? 

 

First, every apartment building stairwell has lights on a timer, so when you flip the switch when you walk in (unlike here where lights are on from sun down to sun up), if you forget to turn it off when you enter your apartment, they auto shut off after a bit. Genius.

 

Also, buildings are constructed with just a few types of stone that are native (I am pretty sure) to the region (Jerusalem stone, in particular). The stone structures and tile flooring keep apartments cool in the summer, limiting the need for air-conditioning at least in some ways.

 

Driving from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, my brother was telling me about all the trees I was staring at–apparently the country selected the style of tree strategically, as its roots soak up excess moisture in the swampy land. So when you plant a tree in Israel, that’s what you help fund.

 

On that same drive, though, we massed the massive land fills that they build up and cover with dirt. It occurred to me that the country would be an ideal place to standardize composting. The country is about as big as New Jersey and has a pretty serious agricultural arm, so the compost would be put to good use. In fact, it killed me when I got some fresh OJ from a stand and watched the guy toss orange halves into the trash without squeezing every last drop of juice possible from it…so wasteful!! If that went to a compost heap, I’d feel less bad…haha. There are private organizations working on this, as well as the state’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, but I think more could be done–in Israel and here in the U.S.