garbage is good

Recently a friend of mine pondered the future of garbage:

I began to wonder whether ultimately it is ecologically more responsible to litter. The argument goes like this, if you assume that the amount of garbage produced is not going to diminish and in fact will increase. In fact the only way this would not happen is if either our society collapsed back to an agrarian state or there was some massive global change in the attitudes of people and we all began avoiding processed food and consumer goods. At present I consider the later virtually impossible and the former possible, but unlikely. Which means that I must accept that the volume of garbage produced will grow somewhat exponentially. So even if we segregate it in special areas, eventually it will spread out over the world. Thus, eventually all life on the plant must adapt to living in our refuse. If we don’t expose them to this change in their environment until the very last minute, they will have no opportunity to adapt. But if we gradually expose them by spreading the garbage around, then the gradual selection pressures will allow life to adapt to a world covered in a layer of plastic bags.

This got me thinking about the role of garbage in the ecosystem and the future of garbage on earth.

First, to the issue of whether garbage will eventually cover the earth. This seems to me to not be plausible, since garbage decays and degrades over time. What is the decay rate versus the accumulation rate? Decay can take many forms, e.g., rotting, disintegration, being buried and sent deep into the earth, sinking to the bottom of the sea, but let's just call it decay. Then there should be some equilibrium point at which the amount of garbage will stabilise. When the rate of garbage production increases, the equilibrium point will move up to a higher total amount of garbage.

We can already see that this phenomenon is in effect, for example, with used cars, tyres, and plastic bags that litter the world. Also, there are people in some third world countries (I know for sure in the phillipines) that live in garbage dumps and forage. I remember there was a news report out of the Phillipines some years ago about several such people that were killed in a garbage landslide.

Maybe today's garbage is tomorrows archeological artifact. Stone age people probably didn't value their earthenware pots as much as we value them. In ten thousand years, a team of people will spend vast amounts of money to collect plastic bags and broken stereos.

Over millions of years today's garbage dumps will eventually become rich deposits of rare, high-energy compounds. Our descendants, who by that time may or may not be human, will value them as places to be mined and used for technologies far in the future. Bats had no idea that their shit would one day be called guano and be a valuable product. Maybe the same is true for us. Another species will value our detritus. The more we produce, the better for them. So hurry up and start polluting my friends. The future of the planet depends on it.