Preview

Landfill Essay

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
390 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Landfill Essay
My family and I live in a landfill. We have no money and fight for survival day by day. We live through people’s waste and the things they do not want. We struggle for food and finding a protective shelter. I receive no education a long with the rest of my family. Sleeping night-to-night outside is a struggle. I sleep on a tarp under a number of boxes set up. Mother nature plays a toll on our survival. When it thunderstorms or is below freezing temperatures our life is in danger. I suffer from frostbite and several sicknesses due to the cold. I do not get many choices of food to choose from. I have to either search through the garbage to find something that is rotten and old or find something to kill to eat. The methane gas the landfill creates helps start fires to cook and help keep us warm. We use traps to catch animals such as rats. Struggling for money, if an item that is sent to the landfill is valuable we will try to sell the item or walk to a pawnshop to earn money. The walk takes a very long time so we collect and save the items, once we have enough, we will take a trip to the pawnshop or the streets to sell items. Everyone who sees us stares and judges us. It is embarrassing and very hard for a kid to handle.
We do not get to play sports or activities that normal kids do. We make up our games and fun with the trash. We climb the trash for our jungle gym. We have made up several trash games. My favorite game is to play our style of baseball. Playing these games do put some fun into our lives. I am grateful we have each other because I could not do this alone.
As you can see our lives are a lot different than a normal American lifestyle. We go through struggles that people would not be able to imagine. When a person thinks they can’t survive when their blackberry breaks they do not even realize the troubles people like us face. We are thankful we are a family and can go through these struggles together because in the end that is all

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    The story that your about to read is true, the names were not changed on purpose so that the characters could reflect back on this event in the future. This was done so that, they could continue to gain from their experience from what they learned. Brent and Sheila were to be married, and the pressure of all that planning was starting to mount on both their minds. Brent has been taking classes online to finish his BSN degree in Nursing. He wanted to get just one more class out of the way, before the autumn semester started. As Brent was at his computer reading his Anthropology, a class that Brent found very stressful, because of the short 6 week semester, and the incredible amount of time that it took him to do his work, was very overwhelming to him.…

    • 558 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The world is full of funny things doing things to certain beings that sometimes seem to not be very funny. Life has a way of forcing a man to see particular phenomena through other men’s eyes. Sometimes that “other” is the one type of person you knew you would never be, or at least you thought you did.…

    • 359 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    There are so many helpful things by recycling; by recycling you will save space in the landfill for something else that can not be recycled. You can use your food scraps for compost, along with your yard…

    • 1219 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    First impressions are very defining. Normally people make first impressions once they see the actions of other people. Depending on what that person or group did gives people watching a bad eye. The act of littering may seen very much inconsequential, but over a period of time it creates a very obnoxious viewpoint towards the community and the people which isn't easy to wipe clean. Littering changes a person's character, concern of the environment, and people's personal sense of direction.…

    • 2114 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Poverty Satire

    • 700 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The act of throwing food away is often forgotten, but with this new profound idea other Americans can feel charitable each time they throw away their trash. Their leftover food will go straight to the landfill and become a nice snack or a whole meal for one of the landfill residents. Society will no longer have to worry about starvation because essentially anyone can provide for the poor. People will eventually feel better about the act of throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars of wasted food knowing that it will go to a family in need. However, people will be questioning why it has to stop with food. Used tissues, old dental floss, and that rusted razor that everyone has lying about will ensure that the landfill residents have acceptable hygiene. The rainwater combined with the last few congealed drops of some liquid soap will keep the landfill inhabitants fresh and clean. There will be competition in the landfills for the best food and supplies or the best cardboard, but that should be promoted because they need to understand that although everything will be essentially thrown out to them, it will still be “survival of the fittest”.…

    • 700 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dumpster Diving Analysis

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Lars Eighner has always been fascinated with dumpsters. He states in his essay that he even reached out to the Merriam-Webster service to learn what he could about the word “Dumpster” (139). A year before his unfortunate homelessness, Eighner started a hobby, and to some a lifestyle, called “Dumpster diving” (139). Throughout his story, Eighner teaches his audience the do’s and do not’s of dumpster diving, how to eat dumpster food safely and ultimately the wastefulness that lies within our society.…

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    One of the worse thing I have been through was my own foolish choice. I moved to Detroit to do food activism and make a permaculture homestead. I did not have wealthy family members to ask for help or a degree that would have gotten me a job. The soil was damaged enough that some areas you could only eat from raised gardens. It was not as advertised. It was like trying to do peace corps with no support system or even police. I ended up suicidal and starting myself because the food stamps office just laughed at me and told me to go back to Iowa.…

    • 107 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    life. Though they are members of society that extols material success above any other, they are…

    • 1119 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    If the trash is continuity dumped in a landfill many miles away you just happen to forget about it, however people won’t forget if a landfill just happens to fall next to a home. Well with the growing amount of trash the amount of landfill space is growing smaller and smaller. A portion of the material is burned emitting harmful gasses to the surrounding land. The majority, however, is thrown into a landfill and forgotten. “Liquids that get thrown away will seep through the ground and could harm the soil.” (unknown). When the liquids are thrown away, they can seep into the ground and cause damage to the plants. When this damage is don’t to the plants it also affects the wildlife’s food. Under those circumstances, recycling would be much better for the environment and the…

    • 783 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    First, composting has many benefits for the environment. When food is disposed of in landfills, it is decomposed without the use of oxygen by anaerobic bacteria. These bacteria create methane. If more food waste is composted, then less methane is released to contribute to the global warming effect. Methane gas is 21 times more potential to make an effect in the environment than carbon dioxide (Obear). Composting also decreases the need for fertilizers and pesticides on crops. Unlike fertilizers, compost releases nitrogen very slowly, which means there will be a minimal negative impact on ground water and other surface water supplies (Benefits of Using Compost). The composted food is very rich in nutrients from the broken down food and can be used to make crops more healthy (Composting Benefits). Food waste can get very unsanitary if it is in dumpsters and landfills. Animals can get into it and cause problems. If waste is placed in a closed off container for composting, then it becomes much more sanitary and it is out of the way of animals (Rogers).…

    • 835 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Soon going to the will no longer be a vacation option unless you do not plan to swim. There will probably be a huge amount of plastic and trash in the water. This is due to the Pacific trash vortex. All of the plastic that has accumulated over the years had either eended up in a landfill or in the ocean. It is however, more likely that the trash has ended up in the ocean. Trash that people just toss in the water ends up in the ocean. Americans fail to realize that bodies of water connect to larger bodies of water which eventually leads to that onee fun special vacation spot. A trash vortex is a big lanfill of garbage and plastic that ends up in the water. It is also known as a garbage patch. Sometimes the vortex is hard to see because the materials sink down to the bottom of the ocean floor. There has been much more garbage placed in the ocean than most people realize. Until you actually research this understanding how much trash ends up in the ocean is not possible. “Because of its durability and our increased use in recent decades, scientists estimate that plastic makes up 60 to 80 percent of marine debris worldwide.”( “Trashing the Ocean.“) This essay will further summarize what the pacific trash vortex is, describe the impacts the trash vortex has on the environment, talk about some of the biggest controvesies around this issue, and give my point of views on the issue.…

    • 1804 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    I didn’t recycle as a child, but when I moved to Germany while I was in the military, it was required that you recycled. The military gave us different colored recyclable bags, which helped in sorting cans, plastic and paper. A good example from Clay (2001) is “incentives like bottle deposits encourage people to recycle”. I think the influence of those rules turned me into an environmentalist. If you got caught not recycling or sorting your recyclables, there were consequences. I am not one for getting into trouble, so I was always sure I did it right. I feel so strongly about this because I have this picture in my mind of all this trash piling up around us and no clean air to breath.…

    • 549 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Recycling is a method that appeared as a solution for the problems that environmentalists were having with landfill’s capacity and contamination of garbage around 1980’s. According to Christopher Douglass (2003), dramatic predictions of landfill closings created a crisis mentality in America. He also informs that the in 1988 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported to Congress that “one-third of all landfills in the United States would close by 1994 and that by 2008 nearly 80 percent of landfills would be shut down” (Douglass, 2003). The situation that the EPA presented to the Congress in 1988 seemed to be disastrous; but fortunately those predictions were all wrong. The problem with these predictions was that the government and environmentalists turned on red lights in order to solve this issue in a positive way that could help the planet’s environment. As a result, state and local…

    • 3039 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Rising affluence is a key factor in today’s increase in waste and rubbish. In today’s society the majority of people are able to afford the higher standards of living and more luxurious items. Take a television for example; in the 1950’s televisions were regarded as a luxury. Those families that had a black and white television were regarded as wealthy or rich. However, skip to today’s society and everybody has a television and they are now seen as a necessity rather than a luxury item regardless of a families’ on individuals’ financial capacity. As well as the increase in households there has also been an advance in technology; we are now seeing plasma, HD or 3D televisions as the luxury item to be had in households (Making social lives, P. 109, 2010).…

    • 1554 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    From 1942 to 1953 a landfill in the Niagara Falls area known as the love canal, was contaminated by Chemicals and then sold to the city after being covered up by layers of dirt. The city then allowed homes and schools to be built over the landfill and people started to feel the effects of the hazardous waste. Scientists were brought in and were able to determine that the chemicals dumped seeped into basements and the air and were responsible for the ill health of the residents. The cleanup at the toxic waste site, the nation's most notorious, took 21 years and cost close to $400…

    • 107 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays