What should we do with urban waste management and/or landfills in general?

So long as businesses worldwide operate on the core VABE What are VABEs? of “maximizing profits” the landfills of the world will continue to expand and overflow. The responsible alternative is IMO “maximizing sustainable profits” by which I mean profits that protect rather than abuse the Commons: air, water, soil, flora, fauna and the underprivileged. Every person, family, company and nation bears a responsibility to the rest of us to protect the Commons.

What that would mean in terms of urban and other landfills is that manufacturers would be responsible for recycling the end-of-life products and packaging that they produce.

A macro and a micro example. Japan has a law banning automobiles over ten years in age. This benefits the Japanese automobile industry of course. So they ship the ten year old, about one hundred thousand miles on them automobiles to central African nations who are happy to have the dependable cars with another 100,000 left on them. Problem is noted a student of mine from that region that when the cars are dead, everyone just leaves them where they die. His country, my student said, was becoming the junkyard of the world. At the opposite end of that scale, I had a hot tub for 36 years—it had “died” years ago but the manufacturer had gone out of business and there were no parts and no one would service it. A junk removal company wanted to charge me $450 to pick it up — and dump it in a landfill. So I cut it up into smaller easily managed pieces and my trash company (who recycles what they can) will pick up the pieces for $200. Non-biodegradable plastics and foams. Electric motor and pumps. Electrical panels and circuit boards. Still going into a landfill.

What to do? Manufacturing companies would predictably fight this suggestion with everything they had—yet if it were an acceptable VABE, imagine how they would rethink product and packaging design. Research into biodegradable products and packaging would blossom. Company funded recycling centers would sprout. Sustainable national economic policies would continue and accelerate. We are headed very slowly in that direction anyway because of the problems you suggest/imply. So long as business people hold onto the VABE of maximizing profits the world’s companies will continue to fill the world’s landfills. For executive teams to accept their citizenship responsibilities in a global economy and protect not abuse the Commons, we will continue to create more and more landfills and sadly “oceanfills.” The major rivers of the industrialized world continue to pour hundreds of millions of tons of plastic into the oceans. See Visual Capitalist.

The reality is though that VABEs remain nearly 100% habitual—mindlessly repetitive. Getting a person or a culture (which is a collection of shared VABEs) to examine and change a VABE is very difficult and largely unsuccessful. In the end, everything eventually comes down to VABEs. See Kahneman’s Nobel Prize. People make big decision based on VABEs over solid evidence. VABEs “trump” science.