Not in my backyard!

Today's rant is about landfills. From the title you might think I want to scream that some entity wants to put a landfill near my property and I don't want it. Nope, that's not it. It's almost the opposite, really. I'm sick and tired of people fighting to keep a landfill out of "their backyard." As long as politicians bow to this, we're going to build a serious problem.

In Orange County, North Carolina, they are planning to start trucking their waste somewhere else when their current only landfill is full and has to close. Are you kidding me? This is not a county completely built out into an urban metropolis here. There's plenty of rural area available. But when they've been proposed, people fight it to keep it "not in my backyard!" So what are they going to do? Truck it somewhere else. That's right, the county that's home to Chapel Hill, a town that will allow no new drive-through restaurants to be built because they don't want to encourage cars to sit still idling, is going to pay for trucks to drive the waste to another county and then pay to dump the waste.

How does this make sense? And while I'm on the topic, why are there so few initiatives to reduce the amount of relatively non-biodegradable waste we produce as it is? One of the worst offenders, in my opinion, is also the most annoying, and that's the famed "blister" packaging. The vacuum formed clear plastic that's encased our entire retail world is also the most obnoxious packaging on the planet. I suppose in some way it reduces theft. I'm also sure it presents the product in a pleasing manner. But what I know is that it must be CHEAP. Dirt cheap. And whats worse? There's no way to recycle that stuff that I know of easily. You just throw it away. And then it sits in the ground for tens (and probably hundreds) of years before it breaks down into something else. Whatever it breaks down into is probably toxic, too.