Solid waste is mostly an urban phenomenon. In rural communities there are fewer packaged products, less food waste and less manufacturing. A city resident generates twice as much waste as their rural counterpart of the same affluence. If we account for the fact that urban citizens are usually richer, they generate four times as much.
"Peak waste" is not projected to occur in this century, so the question becomes twofold: where to put all the trash, and how to produce less of it. As noted above, solid waste is primarily generated by urbanites; it would therefore seem reasonable to deemphasize high-density apartments, condos, and the like - yet that is precisely what Portland and the Metro regional government persist in emphasizing. In brief, their goals are exactly the opposite of what's needed.
As urbanization increases, global solid-waste generation is accelerating. In 1900, the world had 220 million urban residents (13% of the population). They produced fewer than 300,000 tonnes of rubbish (such as broken household items, ash, food waste and packaging) per day. By 2000, the 2.9 billion people living in cities (49% of the world's population) were creating more than 3 million tonnes of solid waste per day. By 2025 it will be twice that — enough to fill a line of rubbish trucks 5,000 kilometres long every day.
Over the past several decades, the Metropolitan Service District (Metro, established 1970) has worked to constrict development and artificially drive up land prices through the establishment of the Urban Growth Boundary, the goal of which is to confine businesses and residents within a defined urban area. The idea is to prevent "sprawl", which Metro's planners and politicians deem to be terrible; as we see, however, their goal is antithetical to the goals of resource conservation and reduction of solid waste - as more and more people are packed into lab-rat cages stacked atop one another, several times more solid waste is generated than is the case when people are permitted to live in rural surroundings.
In other words, while Metro continually promotes the importance of conservation and being green&sustainable™, in practice, the agency and its legion of planners manage to produce results that are diametrically opposed to their supposed goals; their planning efforts and controls actually produce more solid waste than would be the case if residents had been left alone. Once again, we see the unintended consequences of excessive layers of government.
There's a term that describes doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
