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Throw Away Culture
"Do people believe that they’re too good to throw things into the trashcan? Or are they so ignorant as to think that there are people who will pick up behind them?"
By Kandyce Harris
The City of L.A. produces four thousand tons of trash a day. The City sends about half of it to towns on the outskirts of the city, and even into Orange County. Youth Radio L.A.’s Kandyce Harris has been thinking about all that trash piling up and what it means for the generations to come.
At my housing complex, I see people throw garbage just around the trashcan, but not IN the trashcan. The garbage man doesn’t pick it up. The people don’t pick it up. The City doesn’t pick it up. I think the community has gotten so lazy that it has rubbed off on even the smallest kids.
At school they don’t throw things into the garbage. The janitors walk around the school picking trash up all day, and people still have the guts to throw their trash onto the ground. My friend Jasmine thinks our disposable culture is to blame.
JASMINE (on tape)
People are lazy because they use paper plates and paper cups and they just don’t want to recycle them when they get finished they just wanna throw them out they don’t want to throw them in the trash.
KANDYCE
It’s like they don’t have respect for their school, community, their homes, and most importantly themselves. Do people believe that they’re too good to throw things into the trashcan? Or are they so ignorant as to think that there are people who will pick up behind them? My uncle Edward says we weren’t always like this. He has a lot of opinions on this topic and has seen the culture change over the years.…
EDWARD (on tape)
I think one of the main reasons we have so much garbage or trash if you will is because we live in such a consumer driven economy and we live in a throw away generation, a microwave generation where if something doesn’t work you throw it away and just go buy a new one.
KANDYCE
Even I’m guilty of being part of the throw-away culture. I eat microwave popcorn and throw away the paper bag. And when paper decomposes in a landfill, it produces a greenhouse gas that damages the environment.
But what can I do about it all? It seems like there’s no way around it. Everything we eat seems to come in a plastic container, which COULD be melted down and reused. Think about it, you buy tomatoes and they come in that green plastic, you buy milk that doesn’t come from the farmer or in reusable glass bottles, it comes in a plastic or paper jug. It keeps building up and building up. Most of it won’t dissolve or go away.
We can recycle, but seventy-five percent of these plastics still end up in the landfills. Then the toxins in the garbage dumps leak out toward our groundwater. As a young person looking forward, I don’t see any way out of it. The trash of generations will pile up and over the next century you won’t be able to go outside and breath clean air or drink clean water. Even now, there’s bacteria and smog everywhere, and in a hundred years we might need to wear a mask to go outside. Jasmine and I agree, it’s pretty scary.
Jasmine, do you think people will not do anything until the point when it’s too late?
JASMINE (on tape)
Yep, cause everybody does everything at the last minute sure do sure do think that.
KANDYCE
Since we’re not dying from it now, it’s supposed to be O.K. It won’t be a problem until it’s right upon our backs, until our children and grandchildren are suffering from it. We may be long gone, but they are the ones who will pay the price. To prevent all of this from happening, we should at least start to develop practices that stop companies from packaging everything and acquire habits like re-using not just recycling- get out of the habit of just throwing something away and never thinking about it again.
- That story was produced by Youth Radio’s Environmental Desk in association with National Geographic.
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