Waking up to trash in Pennsylvania

I’m trying to imagine 350 train cars a day filled with 20 tons of trash landing being delivered to a landfill. If each train car carries 20 tons and the landfill takes in over 7000 tons, that’s how I came up with the 350.

Here’s a link to an graphic showing where NYC trash goes.

About the map

This is a quick sketch concept, done in the morning to get me interested in the day.

This map uses a light watercolor wash over a parchment instead of watercolor paper.  The PA DEP has several datasets, but I had to take the data for the quantities from a table and manually type the data into a field in QGIS. The circles indicate tons of trash per day that come to a location.  There are about 43 locations.

What I didn’t show here is all of the abandoned landfill sites.  That just overwhelms PA.  But I wonder what it would be like to dig a hole and see what you get from a 1920’s landfill. 

There are also composting sites, construction waste sites, and toxic land disposal sites. These probably aren’t shown on this map.

The map started out because I saw an article about NY trash being shipped to Pennsylvania. And I came across a video of Matt Cotton, who is an expert in composting out in California. I thought he might appreciate a map of PA waste.

I just wonder about all the things we don’t see. What happens when we ask why we have so much trash?  Whose responsibility does it become?  How are geopolitics involved?  How long can our environment handle this?

On one hand, corporations have come to Pennsylvania to ship natural gas around the world.  On the other, our state is collecting trash from New York.  It seems that if Pennsylvanians really had the ability to care for the land and resources in our state, we would be focused on reducing waste and minimizing extraction.

So the question I have is – who controls our state?