Sacred Living

by Rachel Barge

Imagine a gigantic Ikea, 3 acres in size, except everything for sale has been diverted from a landfill. Down one aisle, hundreds of solid wood doors; down another aisle, porcelain toilet bowls.  Deep bins filled with forks of every size, stacks of bowls and kitchenware from the 1950’s to last year.  Light fixtures of every description hanging from the ceilings, walls of stereo equipment and more stuffed armchairs than you can count.

It’s all quality, it’s all dirt cheap, and it all would have been sitting in a landfill if it wasn’t for Urban Ore, a for-profit “eco park” in Berkeley, California.

In my post today, I want to highlight how one small company is doing big things to fight a national and global epidemic of trash - a private sector solution that can help us all do our part in stopping waste.

How does Urban Ore work?  Items are “mined” in a variety of manners: some are donated via community drop-offs and estate sales, some are salvaged from dumps, even some are plucked from unwitting dumpsters – all underappreciated products with a much richer life to live.  Urban Ore’s product procurement department is basically a dumpster-diver’s dream-job.

Once reclaimed the products are cleaned, priced and organized, they are sold by a peppy crew of 30+ staff.  Did I mention that these lucky folks earn a living wage (in the Bay Area!), have benefits such as paid vacations and full employer-paid health, dental, and vision plans (including coverage for dependents), and take advantage an income-sharing incentive!?  This ain’t some non-profit squeaking by on a great mission but little funds – Urban Ore is a full fledged business operation that benefits the community, its employees, and the planet.

Urban Ore is committed “to ending the age of waste by advocating and developing total recycling”.  They design disposal facilities for zero-waste and publish technical papers in their spare time, and have helped entire communities from Humboldt County in California to the island of Kauai establish zero-waste systems.

I frequent Urban Ore before buying any household item new, and have been known to stop by with friends for no real good reason other than to bask in the glory of what feels like the ultimate thrift store.

But there’s more than just fun and savings behind the mission of Urban Ore - they are one small business tackling a huge global problem: landfills.

The U.S. alone has 3,091 active landfills and over 10,000 old municipal landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.   On average, every single American produces 3.5 pounds of trash per day (and there’s 300 million of us), creating roughly 18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash.  If you took ALL our trash and piled it 400 feet deep (as tall as a 40-story building), it would cover more than 1,000 acres of land.  Ouch!

If you kept filling up this “national landfill” for 100 years, and if you assume that during this time the populations of the United States doubles, then the landfill would cover about 160,000 acres, or 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep.

Here’s another way to think about it (thanks to HowStuffWorks.com).  The Great Pyramid in Egypt is 756 feet by 756 feet at the base and is 481 feet tall, and anyone who has seen it in real life knows that it’s a huge thing — one of the biggest things ever built by man. If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high.

That’s a lot of trash!

As many communities are coming to realize, landfills are expensive, take up huge amounts of land, and have increasingly been linked to major public health hazards due to leaching of toxic chemicals and other pollutants into drinking water.  Zero Waste America, a non-profit environmental research organization, found that “80% of landfills surveyed in 2000 had leaks.”  The EPA itself stated in 1988: “All landfill liners and leachate collection systems will fail.”

Landfills contribute significantly to the climate crisis, by belching methane and other greenhouse gases as their contents slowly break down over time.  Many products that end up in landfills, however, such as plastics and metals, will take hundreds or thousands of years to degrade, meaning generations upon generations will be dealing with our waste…nearly forever!

So what’s the solution to all this trash? 

Zero-waste policies have become a new goal of many major cities in the U.S. who wish to protect their citizens from the hazards of landfills, and re-purpose perfectly good materials that can be recycled and reused in their communities.  Companies like Urban Ore are aiding this transition in the private sector, non-profits like the Zero Waste Alliance advocate and educate the public, while cities like San Francisco, Austin and Seattle are leaders in terms of municipal policy for zero-waste.

Check and see if your city has a zero-waste plan - if not, bring up the idea at your city council meeting!  If you’re looking to read up on the subject, one of the most popular books on re-thinking the waste stream in modern society is Cradle to Cradle, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart.  A more specific zero-waste book is Getting to Zero Waste by Paul Palmer.

And if you live in the Bay Area, you can mine Urban Ore Monday through Saturday between 8:30am- 7:00pm, Sundays 10:00am ‘till 7:00pm at 900 Murray St (at San Pablo) in Berkeley, CA 94710.  You can also visit StopWaste.org for more information on local recycling and trash services in Alameda County.

We can all agree that saddling every foreseeable future generation of humanity with epic amounts of waste just isn’t fair, healthy or necessary - the technologies and strategies exist to avoid such a path.  We can reduce our personal waste at home by eliminating unnecessary packaging and foregoing disposable wares, but more importantly, we can pressure our cities and states to pass comprehensive zero-waste policies.

As neat as a gigantic pyramid of trash would be, we’re much better off appreciating the pyramids we already have, and keeping our communities and planet safe for the long haul.