What’s Under the City on a Hill
Jesus told his followers that a city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Although neither his intended nor historical context, this statement is certainly true of the communities that have sprouted prominently atop the infamous trash heaps of places like Calcutta and Mexico City. These, of course, are not the only cities that have sprung up on top of garbage.
Other cultures are more subtle about the fact that mountains of discard and ruin lie beneath their cities. Mankind has often chosen to build cities in layers, covering the ruins of a past with a sheathing of new structures and usages. In Europe, it is not uncommon for a tired tourist to sit down and rest on a stone wall jutting above the earth’s surface by a foot or two, an indication of ancient Roman days. In the New World, there are old street surfaces being uncovered and restored to the original stones that were left by ships unloading ballast as they took on rice and cotton to re-cross the Atlantic. Coastal colonial towns used their refuse as part of landfill projects to push back the tides and build wharves and fortresses.
Detritus has been a mainstay in civilizations’ building techniques since the time of Ur, regardless of how materially affluent or simple the community may have been. Archaeologists and historians try to piece mysteries of the past together by dig findings but some remain impenetrable to their understanding. There are mounds in different parts of the world that still defy interpretation, leaving these specialists in a quandary as to whether this structure had ceremonial significance or it purpose was primarily that of a dumping ground.
This begs the question of what archaeologists and anthropologists of the future will conclude about our culture today that is laced with landfills. Will the contents of these mounds be a quick read for scholars, or will they be left shaking their heads in bewilderment, unsure of how to decipher the code that lies within? Certainly a prevalent question will rise as to what the possible meaning could be of the disproportionate presence of a certain fetid plastic-skinned paper product, what we would readily recognize as discarded adult diapers.
Incredibly, diapers account for almost 10% of our society’s household garbage. Sources claim that 3% of these are baby diapers, the remaining 7% balance being adult diapers. Babies tend to outgrow diapers after about two and a half years. But with life expectancy on the rise and more of our population heading into the senior years when incontinence products again can become an issue, it is easy to see how future adult diapers statistics can become be quite dire. Diapers are considered to be the third largest contributor to landfill waste. Adult bodies are a lot larger than toddlers’. So as the diaper demographic shifts, it is no surprise that much more space will be required for their disposal.
An aluminum can takes about 200 years to completely break down under typical landfill conditions. Shockingly, an adult diaper takes the same amount of time, more in some calculations, to disintegrate under the same circumstances. Oxygen is a key element for decomposition to take place and well maintained landfills ironically starve the garbage of this necessary ingredient. To manage the putrid nastiness of a landfill and to keep the public’s health as shielded from their trash as much as possible, many landfill sites try to apply a six inch layer of soil over the top of daily dumpings. This oxygen depriving burial and compacting works in tandem with public health efforts to keep oxidizing water out and leachate in, and leads to what is known as “dry tomb effect”. Refuse is inadvertently mummified, making for fascinating future archaeology, especially when considering the inevitable density of adult diapers that will be encountered.
“Brownfield” is the ecological term for a fallow landfill site before it is cleaned up – how appropriate when considering the diaper element. Brownfields become the mounds upon which expanding cities are built, today and long into the future. The press of urban life and its real estate requirements eventually dictate that developers turn the soil and turn a buck. Planners’ designs make it possible to completely ignore the history of the compacted detritus of broken hair dryers, rotting sofas and adult diapers that lie beneath. They dutifully follow the real estate maxim that location is everything: Everyone knows that if you want a great view, build on a hill.
