The most annoying thing about the Universal Administrative culture?  Once you become aware of a particular lunacy, it smacks you in the face, over and over, every time you see it.  It’s like waking up with “Bohemian Rhapsody” playing in your head, and being tortured for the rest of the day. The only advantage:  each lunacy – and there are many – forces us to exercise some “Independent Thinking.” Independent thinking? 

    For example:  you stand at a drugstore checkout, with a half-dozen small items, debating whether to spend five extra cents on a 0.05 cent plastic bag. After all, “We All Know” that plastic products are filling our landfills at a terrifying rate. So a five cent levy either encourages us to avoid them or does… something… about the deadly landfill scourge.

    Then you remember:  every time a dog-owner takes their beloved Shiatzu for a walk, they follow lovingly behind, dutifully encasing each canine stool in… a plastic bag!  Plastic bags are too environmentally expensive to carry your medications, but not Buttercup’s poop.

    Here’s the rhetoric of the War on Plastic:  an Earth Worshipper holds up a plastic cap from a milk jug, and utters in grimly prophetic tones:  “If I bury this plastic cap in a landfill, it will lie there without decomposing for a thousand years.”

    Just imagine: a thousand years.

    In response, we could hold up a stone pebble and suggest:  “If I bury this pebble in a landfill, it will also lie there without decomposing for a thousand years.  So what?”

    As with plastic caps, so with potshards. When archeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered ancient Troy, he found a hill of nine distinct cities stacked upon each other, rising on 3,500 years of broken potshards. No kidding:  when your domestic economy is borne in clay pots, you generate lots of potshards. And cities have always grown over their landfills. Today we make them parks and soccer fields.

    Our problem today is this:  under the Homogenous, Universal and Managerial Administration (HUMA), we’ve lost the fundamental distinction between pollution and waste. Pollution is anything poisonous to life.  Waste however is life-enhancing. Life lives off waste. Mushrooms live off plant droppings. Grazers live off dead grass. Canines live off dead grazers. Fourteen trillion trees live off carbon dioxide, produced (in very small part) by seven billion human beings. When we visit a bar, we live off yeast urine. Waste is good. Waste is life.

    If waste is good, why do we think it’s bad?  The Public Administration monopolizes waste, and the more complicated that’s made, the more swells the Waste Administration. So the Administration treats all waste like it’s noxious. It’s not a conscious conspiracy. It’s the religious instinct of regulating everything unregulated, sacrificing the tax base.  

    A couple of years ago, Keurig  inventor John Sylvan was lamenting the fact that some 30 billion K-Cups had been produced, and they all end up in the landfills. Our landfills are exploding with non-recyclable K-Cups. He wishes he’d never invented them.

Nonsense on stilts.  Worse: hysteria.  The Plastic Revolution – the new Age of Organic Compounds – is as profound and far-reaching as stepping into the Bronze Age. Damning plastics because they don’t rust (otherwise a virtue) is like Stone Age Shamans condemning Bronze, because copper and tin are torn from the breast of Mother Earth. 

    Back to basics.  Landfills commonly are born from tapped-out gravel pits. Our entire civilization is built of gravel – a foot under every road and parking lot, yards under every building, and trillions of tons in their concrete. Gravel comes from gravel pits, the father of landfills and grandfather of parks.  Since cities grow, gravel pits spring up (or  down) everywhere. For example, our mid-sized city of 1.2 million has a ring-road extension project, stretching six lanes maybe 10 miles, and needing 30 bridges. The city conveniently found a gravel bed nearby and created, presto, a modest new gravel pit, just for this project. It’s near an affluent neighborhood, but the homeowners were perhaps pacified by the promise of a soccer field or three, when it’s done.  

On the map, that gravel pit will run roughly 500 by 100 metres, and it might go down 4 metres.  That’s 200,000 cubic metres of pebbles. Let’s say your average pebble runs just under an inch cubed, or .00001 cubic metres.  That means 20 billion pebbles are coming out of that modest gravel pit, much less than half the area of the adjacent neighborhood. So if your K-Cup can be crushed by a landfill tractor to pebble-size, and it can, this one modest landfill alone could swallow two years of global K-Cup production. In the area of a couple of soccer fields.   

How is it that “We All Know” something that simply may not be so? The Universal Administration wants to treat all harmless waste as if it is noxious pollution, and We Believe. And for reasons obscure, Earth Worship encourages the Mysticism of Irrelevant Numbers. For example:  all the K-Cups ever produced could encircle the globe ten times. Yet meanwhile:  the 210 billion aluminum cans produced yearly could encircle the globe 515 times, and so what? Americans do recycle about 67 billion aluminum cans each year, because here and there, given the handling costs, it’s economical.  However, another 38 billion cans go into American landfills, because it’s not worth the time or gasoline. Bottom line: recycling costs, and if it requires public subsidy, the real energy costs have likely outstripped the real energy savings.

Plastics are made from petroleum, cooked with gas, and delivered with diesel. And the process is so efficient that single-use plastic can be reasonable (versus re-washing used sandwich bags). But the public handling network for recycling plastic burns diesel. It’s labor-intensive, so it costs the daily energy consumption of all its workers.  And back at the factory, it still has to be re-cooked with natural gas. So is it more energy-efficient to feed a factory with used plastic or fresh petroleum? I don’t have those numbers, but the fact that recycling must be imposed by the Universal Administration (with its taxes) argues that it wastes more energy than it saves.

If the Trojans had found it economical to re-glue their potshards, they’d have done it. When a pot hit the floor, it was more energy-efficient to get a new one.

Frankly, I think K-Cup inventor John Sylvan should get a Nobel Prize. Single-cup coffee making has saved the world from wasting over 150 billion half-drunk pots of coffee. It’s saved the world from wasting the energy to boil 150 billion pints of water that then went cold in half-drunk pots. How much coffee was saved?  How much power? Nobody knows. But we do know that single-serving has saved us from the tyranny of the prodigal pot.

Meanwhile, all those used K-Cups can sleep the thousand-year Sleep of the Just in their reclaimed landfills, cushioned by plastic-wrapped doggie poop, contemplating Trojan potshards, and serenaded by the cries of the children playing soccer overhead.