index > Today's Earth, Our Future > 7. Let's not be wasteful > How We Can Avoid Turning Our Earth into 'Garbage Planet'
 
How We Can Avoid Turning Our Earth into 'Garbage Planet'Would you like to try an interesting experiment with garbage? Get a bag made of net and put all sorts of garbage into it, such as vegetable scraps, fish bones, a tissue, a candy wrapper, cracker box, an empty can and wrapping paper. Make a list of what you put inside. You might even take some photos as a record.
Next, dig a hole in your backyard and bury the bag full of garbage in the hole. You might want to cover the hole with a few heavy stones so that it won't get dug by a dog or cat. After about a week or two, dig up the bag to see what has happened to the garbage. In this experiment, you can find out which garbage items turn into dirt and which ones don't. Look carefully to learn if, for example, plastic bottles, plastic containers, cling wrap or foil can be put in the category of "garbage that can turn into dirt." What do you think? If you said "No," then you are correct. Old sandals, washing machine drain pipes, broken down computers and erasers are in fact originally made from petroleum, a resource found deep below the earth by drilling what are called "oil wells." These garbage items made from petroleum won't turn into dirt even after thousands of years. This is because they are made from resources that weren't originally found on the earth and so they aren't part of the cycle of living things in the earth's natural recycling system. What do you think will happen if we continue to dig out more and more petroleum to make plastic bags, bottles and other products only to be thrown away after being used only once? Many say that we will run out of petroleum in about 40 years. But chances are, long before that time, our earth will become filled up with the garbage that we carelessly toss out each day. If that's the case, can this problem be solved if we just continue to put our garbage into trash cans? Do you know what happens to those plastic containers, plastic bags and bottles we throw away? They are taken by garbage trucks either to be burned in incinerators (a giant furnace) or to be buried in landfills (a large, outdoor area for waste disposal).
Unless proper methods are used, toxic (harmful) chemicals called dioxins can be released into the air that we breathe when garbage is burned. This has become a serious problem in recent years. So, in that case, you might be wondering, "What's wrong with burying the garbage?" Well, burying the garbage has limitations. For example, in Japan the land is overpopulated and the available landfill area can only sustain the people of that country for a few more years. What happens then? No matter how big the world is, we can't continue to bury garbage that doesn't turn into dirt. Imagine that in the distant future, creatures from outer space come and see the earth, and say disappointedly, "We had heard the earth was a beautiful blue planet. But actually, it's just an ugly Garbage Planet." You wouldn't want them to say that about our earth, would you?
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   7. Let's not be wasteful
   
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