Living with the Legacy of 'Away'

What do you do with waste? Why, you throw it away, of course. But think about the term, "throw it away." Where exactly is this "away" place and what happens to things when they get there?

For the city of Vancouver, away is a place hundreds of kilometers up river. For Toronto, away is a place in a different country. And that's just household garbage being carted off to distant landfills. We also dump air pollutants up our smoke stacks and out our tail pipes. We pour human and industrial waste into our rivers and oceans. We spray chemicals on our crops and hope the residue goes away.

There's an old saying: "The solution to pollution is dilution." In other words, spread the pollution out and the problem goes away. Build your smoke stack higher, flush the pollutants out with more clean water, or spread them out over more land.

Of course, we now realize that this solution wasn't much of a solution at all. It just pushed the problem over to our neighbours, or onto the next generation. Not long ago, the world seemed like a very large place. The atmosphere seemed vast, the oceans massive. There was nothing we couldn't dump out that wouldn't go away - eventually.

Today, we are just beginning to deal with a legacy of using nature as a dumping ground. Some countries are finally starting to reduce the heat-trapping emissions that are disrupting the climate, for example, but others are still ignoring the problem. Canada seems stuck in the middle - making lots of promises, but so far failing to deliver.

Meanwhile, new research to be published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology continues to show that "away" may not exist at all. On the remote west coast of British Columbia, researchers have found that grizzly bears eating a diet rich in salmon are accumulating toxins that build up in the fatty flesh of the fish. These toxins, a brew of persistent organic chemicals like PCBs and flame-retardants, may come from as far away of Asia, but they don't just disappear. They can continue to exist for decades and be transported halfway around the world.

Researchers say that they don't know what effect these toxins are having on the bears, but the chemicals are known to mimic animal hormones and may pose a developmental risk to young cubs. The same chemicals are turning up in much higher concentrations in killer whales and polar bears.

Humans aren't immune to our legacy of hoping things go away either. Bulging landfills, smoggy skies and a disrupted climate are some of the most obvious problems we face as a result. But this legacy often affects us in ways we can't even see. For example, recent research, also published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, has found that rice grown in the United States may contain up to five times more arsenic than rice grown in Europe or Asia.

In this case, the culprit is thought to be arsenic-based pesticides that were sprayed on cotton fields throughout the southern U.S. Many of those fields have since been converted to rice crops and arsenic left in the soil is finding its way into the grains. While consumers would have to eat a great deal of rice to surpass World Health Organization standards, no one knows if there are long-term effects from these arsenic levels.

We live in a disposable culture where it's easy to forget that things we throw away don't necessarily go away. And unless we start ensuring that the chemicals and other junk we release into the environment readily break down and don't build up over time, we will continue to build on our legacy. "Away" may not be on a map, but it's now closer than ever.

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Source: David Suzuki Foundation