The Hidden Life of Garbage

The Hidden Life of Garbage

Comprehension:
1. She says that landfills are tucked away to avoid people asking difficult questions about the sights they see.

2. The landfill’s “working face” is where the dumping takes place.

3. Rogers believes GROWS is aptly named because it is a mega-fill, and continues to grow.

4. The danger of the new state of the art landfills are that if any toxic wastes seeps into the near-by water treatment’s water line the results could be devastating.

5. The repressed question is: “what if we didn’t have so much trash to get rid of?

Purpose and Audience:

1. She states her thesis in paragraph 2. “Although the great majority of our castoffs go to landfills, they are places the public is not meant to see.”

2. Rogers is trying to establish a vision of terrible landfills contaminating our world. She is successful at this attempt.

3. She doesn’t agree with how waste is currently disposed, and neither do I.

Style and Structure:

1. Rogers specifically describes the type of morning it is, the material and weight of the trucks, the sounds they make, and what the workers are doing.

2. In my opinion, there is no certain order Rogers arranges her essay.

3. This essay is subjective because she describes the landfills in detail.

4. The words environmentally responsible are in quotations because she is portraying a sarcastic attitude towards it. The state-of-the-art landfills are not environmentally responsible.

5. The point of her essay isn’t to propose solutions to the problem she states, she wants to inform people of what the landfills are actually doing and hoping someone may do something about it in years to come.

The Hidden Life of Garbage

Summary

The hidden life of garbage is an essay written by a woman named Heather Rogers that explains the garbage disposal process, and its unanswered questions and possible dangers. Rogers begins her essay by clearly describing how garbage is collected in a neighborhood, and describes to the reader where It goes and gives the trash a negative connotation by referring to it as rejectamenta: things rejected and meaningless or useless. Rogers explains where the garbage goes by describing a place known as a land fill. This landfill is a place where simply put, land is filled up with garbage. She then describes how the workers would “orchestrate the burial” of the waste by working together like a well-oiled machine.

Overall the author describes the whole process by using many descriptive word choices such as rejectamenta, and well-oiled machine. Toward the center of Roger’s essay, she begins to go more in depth on the description of the landfills. These landfills don’t permanently get rid of the problem, they just delay the inevitable. The inevitable problem is not what to do with trash, (though that is important) but how much trash we people use. As Rogers concludes her essay, she makes it clear that the main problem isn’t what to do with trash, but the amount of trash that people use.

Journal Entry 3

“The Hidden Life of Garbage” discusses the waste disposal in the U.S. And how dangerous it’s getting. Land dumping has been the primary disposal method for many years because of the low cost. Land dumping is when the waste is dumped into a landfill. A landfill is a carefully designed structure built into or on top of the ground in which trash is isolated from the surrounding environment. This isolation is accomplished with a bottom liner and daily covering of soil. A sanitary landfill uses a clay liner to isolate the trash from the environment. Although the methods of waste disposal have improved over time, getting rid of garbage is quickly becoming a big problem because our methods of waste disposal are only a temporary solution. The waste that cannot decompose naturally, just sits there and begins to build up. Incineration is another method used in waste disposal, however, this poses another problem because it fills the air we breath with dense smoke, which is toxic to our environment. The composition also talks about how the major waste disposal corporations try to keep the problem hidden from the general public. They keep it hidden because it would cause problems for the corporation if the people actually knew what was happening.”If people saw what happened to their waste, lived with the stench, witnessed the scale of destruction, they might start asking difficult questions” (Rogers 189).

Garbage, trash, waste, rubble, junk, whatever you may call it, we all have it. The average American produces about 4.5 pounds of it everyday. The United States makes more garbage than any other country on the planet. We have 5% of the people on Earth, but make almost 1/3 of all the world’s garbage. It’s not a pretty subject and it’s a topic which most people tend to avoid. Once it’s out their door and into their trash cans, people could care less. I fully agree with Heather Rogers, if people actually saw where their waste is going and how it is affecting our environment, they would probably be horrified. Even with the improvements we’ve made, the waste disposal methods aren’t enough. “The more state-of-the-art, the more ‘environmentally responsible ‘ the operation, the more repressed question pushes to the surface: what if we didn’t have so much trash to get rid of?” (Rogers 191). Personally, I have always been a big advocate of recycling and repurposing. Through my volunteer work, I saw first hand what our large amount waste is doing to our planet and decided to make a change. Plastic is the biggest contributor to the amount of waste we have, because it takes about 500 years to decompose in a landfill. For this reason, I always try to use a refillable canteen (BPA free) instead of plastic water bottles, and I don’t use paper plates, cups, or utensils. I also try to use fabric grocery bags instead of plastic ones. By making little changes such as these, our waste output would drastically lessen, and reduce the amount of toxins in our environment. I also think that everyone should read Heather Rogers’ “The Hidden Life of Garbage” to help people become aware of this problem and encourage them to make a change.