Hagatña — Earth Day ought to be renamed Irony Day. April 22 is supposed to remind us that this planet really is our mother, whom we ought to love and respect. It has also become a time when some of the biggest polluters of the environment pose as environmentalists.
President Bush gave a pompous speech in which he declared that everyday is Earth Day for him. Get real, Mr. President. With the possible exception of your father, no American president has ever been a greater threat to the health of this planet.
In another ironic statement, the Pacific Daily News ran an editorial declaring, “GovGuam doesn’t seem to care about our environment.” Although there may be some truth in this statement, it implies that the PDN does care deeply about this issue. Newspapers in general like to run pious editorials about environmental issues, yet the very medium for those words is one of the leading contributors to landfills across the country. A content analysis of the Ordot landfill would likely reveal that the PDN, also, does not seem to care about our environment.
I like the convenience of getting a newspaper dropped on my door step. I just wish it is equally convenient to dispose of the paper in an environmentally friendly way. GovGuam certainly needs to do more to make recycling easier, but private companies also have a responsibility to dispose the waste that they produce. Unfortunately, there are no economic incentives for businesses to practice sound ecology.
The inability of modern civilizations to deal effectively with waste removal is a classic case of the failure of capitalistic philosophy. The reason recycling seems not to be economically viable is because governments have been providing low-cost garbage disposal. The full cost of disposing products and their packaging has never been factored into the pricing system. In effect, governments have encouraged the production of garbage by subsidizing the cost of disposal.
One response to this situation would be adding a Green Tax to products sufficient to cover their waste disposal. This approach would seem well-suited to an island like Guam where almost all products are imported. Every car shipped on island would be charged a tax sufficient to ship it off again. It should be fairly easy to calculate disposal costs for large metal objects. It would be a little more challenging for smaller items, but certainly not impossible in this computer age. By the way, computers would also carry a tax sufficient to cover their disposal and/or encourage recycling and reuse.
The disposal tax could be refunded (at least in part) for items brought in for recycling, which would also decrease littering. Easily biodegradable items such as produce would carry no tax, but the packaging would carry an appropriate disposal fee.
Of course, these taxes would have to be secured in some sort of legislative lock-box so that they could be used only for the intended purpose. They would provide the funding for a new landfill, and they would help minimize the volume of waste that enters that landfill. The Green taxes would finance free garbage pickup for all kinds of garbage, including metal, batteries and yard waste as long as the residents sort the garbage and place food waste in covered containers.
Very little garbage would actually need to enter the landfill. Metals and recyclables would be sent off-island. Food waste could be used as animal feed or composted. Garden waste could be composted, and we might even be able to use a small-scale incineration system for waste-wood, waste-oil, cardboard and paper.
The Green Tax on home newspaper delivery could be waved if the vendors establish a convenient system to pick up old papers so that they can be recycled or composted. I know most readers want to save my columns, but please don’t let the rest of this paper end up in the Ordot landfill. (Send your feedback to [email protected])
