Design > Puritan Pride

The six and-a-half million residents of Massachusetts are responsible for about 1.3 tons of municipal waste production per capita, per annum – or about seven pounds for every person, every day. That’s average for the country. Some places are a lot higher (like Indiana, at 2 tons per capita), and a few are significantly lower (why South Dakotans only produce 0.7 tons each, is what I want to know). While there are some people who would like to see that number reduced to, oh, zero – meet the “zero waste” movement - there are plenty of others who would just like to see that number come down. Waste is money, after all: someone has to collect it, sort it, dispose of it, monitor its breakdown processes for the foreseeable future.

New England is famous for, among other things, its tradition of Puritanical stinginess. “Waste not, want not” really says it all. That mentality has been partially buried underneath the modern onslaught of consumerism, but it lingers.

Just look at Boston, where, at the crest of a spending boom in the late 1980s, the city started planning a new waste-treatment facility. It was the centerpiece of the city’s multi-billion dollar project to clean up the infamously polluted Boston Harbor. The Deer Island Treatment Plant transforms solid waste into compost, clean water and miniscule amounts of landfill, using oxygen and organic compounds in methods that mimic natural digestion. It’s pretty cool. Other aspects of Deer Island embrace the “waste not” ideal: the compost produced is sold to private buyers, and the methane, which is a byproduct of the digestion process, is used as fuel to reduce the amount of energy the facility needs to draw off the municipal grid. Plus, the grounds themselves have been landscaped into a park.

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