In the future we’ll dig up our rubbish tips, we’ll mine them for all of the precious metals and scarce resources that we carelessly throw away day in day out in our profligate way of living. It won’t be the resources that we now think of as precious though, not just the gold or silver but rather their plain cousins such as aluminium, copper and tin. In the future all of those take away cartons that were filled with noodles or chicken jalfrezi and that we have chucked away in a cavalier fashion will become valuable and all the wire and circuitry will be stripped and melted down. It will be more economical to sift through the detritus of our consumerist ways than to rip the bauxite and the cuprite from mother earth.
And then there is all of the plastic. All of those bags and blister packs and extruded bottles, all of those supermarket storage containers that have locked up billions of litres of treasured distilled oil. Today the contents are worth more than the container but in the future it will be the container that has all of the value. We’ll extract them from the land fill to reformat, reconstitute and reuse. We’ll cut them up and masticate them to squeeze out the rich and versatile hydrocarbons we had once wasted.
And then there is all of that food as well, the third of the contents of our fridges and store cupboards that this best-before and sell-by generation manages to throw away, the pith and peelings, the skin and bones, the crusts and broken biscuits and all of that pre-packed, pre-washed and pre-cooked stuff that we over purchase in the misguided belief that we need them. It will rot and ferment and decompose and we’ll pipe out the methane to feed our energy addiction and over time and under pressure the organic matter will be transformed into fossil fuel ready to be dug back up.
And then there is all the paper and cardboard and glass and fabric.
In the future we will be digging up our 21st century tips and the people will scratch their heads and wonder in dismay and disbelief how wanton and wasteful we must have been.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 