More about public health and worker safety:
It's no secret that landfills are filled with substances and chemicals we shouldn't be breathing in, but it's easy to find people who deny that working in such an environment has a negative impact on individual health.
It's safe to assume that parks department jobs are probably more desirable than those in the sanitation department, but you'd be hard-pressed to get city officials to admit there are health risks involved in working in sanitation.
Well an easy, if unscientific, way to consider these potential impacts on health is to look at sick day patterns: in New York City, parks department workers used an average of five sick days in fiscal year 2010, while that number among sanitation workers was 11.5.
Of course, there's the very real possibility that people simply dislike their jobs and take sick days because they can—as is probably the case with the finance department, for example, which also had a high number of called-in sick days.
But it is also no surprise that being surrounded every day by garbage truck fumes and the mystery, potentially harmful contents of people's waste would lead to increased illness. How does your city treat sanitation workers?
It might sound like a tenuous connection, but it's a matter of responsibility and fairness. And it's just one more reason for us all to think, again, about our waste stream: what we throw away not only clogs already-overflowing landfills, compromising the health of the environment and communities around them, but adds risk to people who handle it for us.
Remember the life-cycle story of stuff
Just about everything we buy or use will be disposed of eventually, so use this as another reason to cut down on consumption as much as possible. Buy natural products and avoid toxic materials and chemicals whenever possible—but even for the most harmless, all-natural things, keep their long-term picture in mind: the story of stuff never ends.
