I recently was cleaning my make-up stocks that I’ve been piling up for years, trying to get rid of anything that was expired, outdated or just too weird to use.
And there was a little bottle with dried-up nail polish. I tried to liquify it using Google's wisdom, and once it didn’t work out, I put it in the garbage bin. Then it went like in movies: I unlinked my fingers and the bottle started slowly falling, attracted to the bottom of the bin by gravity.
And while that was happening my thoughts slowly started turning around an idea if I was supposed to recycle the glass. If so, how do I clean out the nail polish from the inside? And even if I do flush it with water, won’t it make even more damage floating somewhere under the ground and then in the rivers?
And if it is just going to the dump and being buried, how long it will take for this bottle to decompose? And again, what about the nail polish?
Ever since being a kid, I was worried about the world around. Dad often got into trouble for throwing cigarette butts out of the car window (back then everybody did it, there hardly were any garbage bins on the streets, people smoked everywhere and garbage was a big part of the landscape). But I sincerely didn’t like it, so when I was giving dad hard times for littering, he would call me GreenPoop (the name of the organization wasn’t translated into Russian and was just transliterated, which in Russian the version pretty much sounded the same with GreenPiss, excuse my language).
The amount of garbage we produce always worried me. I found it ridiculous that to make a cup of tea I often produce at least two pieces of garbage – teabag and a little plastic bag it’s packed into. Plus, there is a box or a tin all bags are packed into. On top of that, there is plastic that the box is covered with.
And my tea is pretty much just water with leaves. How come I needed so much garbage to have a cup of tea?
So, when I got to a point of conscious decisions, I started moving towards decreasing the number of one-time-use things in my life. Bags, cotton pads, cups and glasses, bottles, etc., I replaced them all with reusable ones. I’m still learning the science of separating garbage and I’m trying to grow my healthy and happy compost pile in the back yard (I think a bunny eats all the veggies he can find there before they decompose, but I hope that whatever is left will still make good dirt one day).
While that little glass bottle was still heading towards the bottom of the bin, I also suddenly came across a boring school-time knowledge buried in my head. This glass is pretty much melted send, I remembered. And the nail polish inside it is just a mixture of different chemical elements all of which originally existed on the planet before they turned into this bright sticky liquid. So did every piece of what ends up being garbage. We pick it up or dig it out of the ground, transform and use, then put most of it back into the ground. We are no gods, and we don’t really create matter out of nothing.
Once the bottle finally made it to the bottom of the garbage bin, I looked the topic up. The results of the inquiry were as I expected. Even though all polymers that we came up with consist of what we originally obtained from the surrounding world, we mess their nature so much that they don’t decompose, pretty much at all. And while animals’ and humans’ bones don’t affect the mass of the Earth, turning into a different matter, our creations quickly form ugly garbage piles that surround the cities, and trash fed seagulls complete industrial sights.
According to the 2017 research by Dr. Geyer and colleagues, humanity produced about 8.3 billion tonnes (it’s equivalent to 92 million Mac the Moose statues) of plastic in 65 years. There is enough plastic garbage to fill such a country as Argentina. And instead of becoming a natural part of the system again, simple elements turned into new matters like polymers keep trying to reach the skies.
The Earth just doesn’t know what exactly to do with them. Like us when we come across a new food and don’t know how exactly to eat it.
I hope eventually, the planet will figure its way around our creations and will adjust, but it’s taking much longer to blend our new-time garbage into the soil in comparison to the original ingredients. In the meantime, we are getting pretty close to building cities out of the garbage that doesn’t fit back into the soil. (Have you seen pictures of people living at enormous garbage dumps? It’s scary, but it might be something that’s ahead of us all.)
So I dove into my garbage bin and fished my nail polish bottle out. I’m not sure what’s the best thing to do with it, but the perspective of living in the house, made out of garbage, was so scary that I didn’t want to just bury it at the landfill.
P.S. It’s still sitting on my table, so any suggestions on what to do with it are welcome.
