Garbage Pollution Quotes

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

No. This makes me sad." He pointed at all the garbage on the ground. "And the sky. You can't even see the stars. They've polluted the sky. This is a terrible time to be a satyr.

The scale of the mess we leave behind is proportionate to the level of respect we have for others.

The garbage can is for things that have no importance. If it did have some value, it no longer has any.

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. Castes were not immune to change. In fact, as time went by, large castes were divided into sub-castes. Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000 different groupings called jati (literally ‘birth’). But this proliferation of castes did not change the basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A person’s jati determines her profession, the food she can eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the resulting children inherit that status. Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society. Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts – in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung. They became known as Untouchables. They had to live apart from all other people and scrape together a living in humiliating and disgusting ways, such as sifting through garbage dumps for scrap material. Even members of the lowest caste avoided mingling with them, eating with them, touching them and certainly marrying them. In modern India, matters of marriage and work are still heavily influenced by the caste system, despite all attempts by the democratic government of India to break down such distinctions and convince Hindus that there is nothing polluting in caste mixing.3 Purity

I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth. Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction.

Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage.

Thermophilic composting requires no electricity and therefore no coal combustion, no acid rain, no nuclear power plants, no nuclear waste, no petrochemicals and no consumption of fossil fuels. The composting process produces no waste, no pollutants and no toxic by-products. Thermophilic composting of humanure can be carried out century after century, millennium after millennium, with no stress on our ecosystems, no unnecessary consumption of resources and no garbage or sludge for our landfills. And all the while it will produce a valuable resource necessary for our survival while preventing the accumulation of dangerous pathogenic waste.

The disintegration processes which have become so manifest in recent years—the decay of public services: schools, police, mail delivery, garbage collection, transportation, et cetera; the death rate on the highways and the traffic problems in the cities; the pollution of air and water—are the automatic results of the needs of mass societies that have become unmanageable

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.

Green Capitalism", even if products are produced using the utmost environmental care and designed for easy reuse, offers not way out of a system that must expand exponentially and thus, continue to ratchet up its use of natural resources, its chemical pollution, its contaminated sewage sludge, its garbage, and its many other toxic substances. Some of these "fixes" will probably slow down the rate of environmental destruction, but the magnitude of the needed changes dwarfs these approaches.

Yearning for some form of reconciliation, for a new, fresh beginning to their relationship, she looked forward to her father’s driving her to college—a time when she would be alone with him for several hours. But the long-anticipated trip proved a disaster: her father behaved true to form by grousing at length about the ugly, garbage-littered creek by the side of the road. She, on the other hand, saw no litter whatsoever in the beautiful, rustic, unspoiled stream. She could find no way to respond and eventually, lapsing into silence, they spent the remainder of the trip looking away from each other. Later, she made the same trip alone and was astounded to note that there were two streams—one on each side of the road. “This time I was the driver,” she said sadly, “and the stream I saw through my window on the driver’s side was just as ugly and polluted as my father had described it.” But by the time she had learned to look out her father’s window, it was too late—her father was dead and buried. That story has remained with me, and on many occasions I have reminded myself and my students, “Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.” The woman who told me this story died a short time later of breast cancer, and I regret that I cannot tell her how useful her story has been over the years, to me, my students, and many patients.

Some people will tell you that Toronto, in the summer, is the nothing more than a cesspool of pollution, garbage, and the smells of a hundred ethnicities competing for top spot in a race won historically by curry, garlic, and the occasional cauldron of boiled cabbage. Take a walk down College Street West, Gerrard Street East, or the Danforth, and you'll see; then, they add—these people, complaining—that the stench is so pervasive, so incorrigible, nor merely for lack of wind, but for the ninety-nine percent humidity, which, after a rainstorm, adds an eradicable bottom-note of sweaty Birkenstocks and the organic tang of decaying plant life. This much is true; there is, however, more to the story. Take a walk down the same streets and you'll find racks of the most stunning saris—red with navy brocade, silver, canary, vermillion and chocolate; marts with lahsun and adrak, pyaz and pudina; windows of gelato, zeppole, tiramisu; dusty smoke shops with patio-bistros; you'll find dove-white statuary of Olympian goddesses, mobs in blue jerseys, primed for the World Cup—and more, still, the compulsory banter of couples who even after forty years can turn foul words into the bawdiest, more unforgettable laughter (and those are just the details). Beyond them is the container, the big canvas brushed with parks and valleys and the interminable shore; a backdrop of ferries and islands, gulls and clouds—sparkles of a million wave-tips as the sun decides which colours to leave on its journey to new days. No, Toronto, in the summer, is the most paradisiacal place in the world.

BUYING OFF THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS Where are the environmentalists? For fifty years, they’ve been carrying on about overpopulation; promoting family planning, birth control, abortion; and saying old people have a “duty to die and get out of the way”—in Colorado’s Democratic Governor Richard Lamm’s words. In 1971, Oregon governor and environmentalist Tom McCall told a CBS interviewer, “Come visit us again. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” How about another 30 million people coming here to live? The Sierra Club began sounding the alarm over the country’s expanding population in 1965—the very year Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act passed65—and in 1978, adopted a resolution expressly asking Congress to “conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration laws.” For a while, the Club talked about almost nothing else. “It is obvious,” the Club said two years later, “that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate,” even more than “the number of children per family.”66 Over the next three decades, America took in tens of millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens alike. But, suddenly, about ten years ago, the Sierra Club realized to its embarrassment that importing multiple millions of polluting, fire-setting, littering immigrants is actually fantastic for the environment! The advantages of overpopulation dawned on the Sierra Club right after it received a $100 million donation from hedge fund billionaire David Gelbaum with the express stipulation that—as he told the Los Angeles Times—“if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”67 It would be as if someone offered the Catholic Church $100 million to be pro-abortion. But the Sierra Club said: Sure! Did you bring the check? Obviously, there’s no longer any reason to listen to them on anything. They want us to get all excited about some widening of a road that’s going to disturb a sandfly, but the Sierra Club is totally copasetic with our national parks being turned into garbage dumps. Not only did the Sierra Club never again say another word against immigration, but, in 2004, it went the extra mile, denouncing three actual environmentalists running for the Club’s board, by claiming they were racists who opposed mass immigration. The three “white supremacists” were Dick Lamm, the three-time Democratic governor of Colorado; Frank Morris, former head of the Black Congressional Caucus Foundation; and Cornell professor David Pimentel, who created the first ecology course at the university in 1957 and had no particular interest in immigration.68 But they couldn’t be bought off, so they were called racists.

The smell of sewage flooded into the car and I saw rotting vegetables and chunks of garbage floating in the clogged water on the streets. The city's very own soup of decay, served cold, and each one of us was sipping it bit by bit.

Environmentalists probably know already about “the Great Pacific garbage patch”—that mass of plastic, twice the size of Texas, floating freely in the Pacific Ocean. It is not actually an island—in fact, it is not actually a stable mass, only rhetorically convenient for us to think of it that way. And it is mostly composed of larger-scale plastics, of the kind visible to the human eye. The microscopic bits—700,000 of them can be released into the surrounding environment by a single washing-machine cycle—are more insidious. And, believe it or not, more pervasive: a quarter of fish sold in Indonesia and California contain plastics, according to one recent study. European eaters of shellfish, one estimate has suggested, consume at least 11,000 bits each year. The direct effect on ocean life is even more striking. The total number of marine species said to be adversely affected by plastic pollution has risen from 260 in 1995, when the first assessment was carried out, to 690 in 2015 and 1,450 in 2018. A majority of fish tested in the Great Lakes contained microplastics, as did the guts of 73 percent of fish surveyed in the northwest Atlantic. One U.K. supermarket study found that every 100 grams of mussels were infested with 70 particles of plastic. Some fish have learned to eat plastic, and certain species of krill are now functioning as plastic processing plants, churning microplastics into smaller bits that scientists are now calling “nanoplastics.” But krill can’t grind it all down; in one square mile of water near Toronto, 3.4 million microplastic particles were recently trawled. Of course, seabirds are not immune: one researcher found 225 pieces of plastic in the stomach of a single three-month-old chick, weighing 10 percent of its body mass—the equivalent of an average human carrying about ten to twenty pounds of plastic in a distended belly. (“Imagine having to take your first flight out to sea with all that in your stomach,” the researcher told the Financial Times, adding: “Around the world, seabirds are declining faster than any other bird group.”) Microplastics have been found in beer, honey, and sixteen of seventeen tested brands of commercial sea salt, across eight different countries. The more we test, the more we find; and while nobody yet knows the health impact on humans, in the oceans a plastic microbead is said to be one million times more toxic than the water around it. Chances are, if we started slicing open human cadavers to look for microplastics—as we are beginning to do with tau proteins, the supposed markers of CTE and Alzheimer’s—we’d be finding plastic in our own flesh, too. We can breathe in microplastics, even when indoors, where they’ve been detected suspended in the air, and do already drink them: they are found in the tap water of 94 percent of all tested American cities. And global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, when there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

We will have to downscale our gigantic enterprises and institutions­ - corporations, governments, banks, schools, hospitals, markets, farms­ - and learn to live locally, hence responsibly. We will have to drive less and create decent public transportation that people want to use. We will have to produce less garbage (including pollution) and consume less fossil fuel. We will have to reacquire the lost art of civic planning and redesign our rules for building. If we can do these things, we may be able to recreate a nation of places worth caring about, places of enduring quality and memorable character.

Pollution from garbage, sewage, and agricultural fertilizer runoff, combined with overfishing and spills from offshore oil drilling, may kill off edible sea life completely by 2048.

Leonard grew up to be an activist, traveling the globe for Greenpeace. Along the way, she made a short film about pollution and garbage called The Story of Stuff in hopes of teaching people about the consequences of buying and discarding more things than we truly need. It struck a nerve, a big one, and the video has now been viewed online at least 25 million times. The film became a book and evolved into a nonprofit organization. Stephen Colbert had her on his show and referred to her film as a “craze.” Children eventually joined

You’d escaped because everybody else was hell-bent on wanting everything and you saw it wasn’t going to work….. It wasn’t the age of small nations as you thought, it was the age of money and waste and garbage and pollution and destruction and it was all going to get worse,….

Yogurt is good for you. And it’s just one spoon,” Sharpcot had replied, but this stack summoned a billion voices, all of them saying in a chorus, “Just one spoon.” From kids’ lunches and store shelves and desk drawers and airline meal packs, in every country of the world: Canada and the United States and Nicaragua and Uruguay and Argentina and Ireland and Burkina Faso and Russia and Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and very probably the Antarctic. Where wasn’t there disposable cutlery? Plastic spoons in endless demand, in endless supply, from factory floors where they are manufactured and packaged in boxes of 10 or 20 or 100 or 1000 or individually in clear wrap, boxed on skids and trucked to trains freighting them to port cities and onto giant container ships plying the seas to international ports to intercity transport trucks to retail delivery docks for grocery stores and retail chains, supplying restaurants and homes, consumers moving them from shelf to cart to bag to car to house, where they are stuck in the lunches of the children of polluting parents, or used once each at a birthday party to serve ice cream to four-year-olds where only some are used but who knows which? So used and unused go together in the trash, or every day one crammed into a hipster’s backpack to eat instant pudding at his software job in an open-concept walkup in a gentrified neighbourhood, or handed out from food trucks by the harbour, or set in a paper cup at a Costco table for customers to sample just one bite of this exotic new flavour, and so they go into trash bins and dumpsters and garbage trucks and finally vast landfill sites or maybe just tossed from the window of a moving car or thrown over the rail of a cruise ship to sink in the ocean deep.

Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell the gadgets to millions of people,” wrote Victor Papanek in 1971: Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed.

In the depths of decaying garbage dumps is the sorrow of discarded waste, forgotten by society, choking the life out of our vibrant ecosystems, a negligence upon our environment. The grim realities of our polluted world somehow shows the strength of nature’s resilience, blooming amidst the chaos and reminding us of the potential for renewal if we choose to act right. Our actions, no matter how small, have the power to impact the environment and those around us. We are all accountable as caretakers of this planet we live in. It is our responsibility to preserve earth’s natural beauty and the delicate balance of life that keeps us all alive.