In the late 18th century, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier radically changed how we understand the physical world. He was perplexed by the fact that when metal rusted, despite becoming more brittle, it actually gained weight rather than losing it. Why would metal weigh more when it was decomposing?
It weighed more, Lavoisier came to understand, because the metal was absorbing a then-unknown element: oxygen.
This led to his publishing in the 1789 book “Traité Élémentaire de Chimie” the law of conservation of mass, which states that during a chemical reaction, matter can be neither created nor destroyed. The burning log in your campfire that seems to have disappeared has merely been transformed into ash, water vapor and carbon dioxide.
Matter, alas, doesn’t disappear when we throw trash in the garbage, either. We say “throwing it away” but the age-old sustainability question remains: Where is “away?” The reality is that we are just throwing it.
This is illustrated clearly in Melissa Langer’s “In Excess,” her 2025 documentary about Philadelphia trash, particularly in her footage covering the ill-fated trash barge known as the Khian Sea.
In 1986, the ship, registered in Liberia and contracted by a Philadelphia-based company, was loaded up with 14,000 tons of incinerator ash. New Jersey had previously taken this type of waste, but in 1984, they passed a law ending that practice.
They weren’t alone in wishing to avoid being a dumping ground. Over the next 16 months, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Panama, Bermuda, Guinea-Bissau and the Dutch Antilles all refused the ash. In January 1988, 4,000 tons of the ash were dumped on a Haitian beach. After learning what had happened, the Haitian government tried to get the ship to take it back, but they were unsuccessful.
The Khian Sea returned to Philadelphia, but the pier where it would have been received had a mysterious fire just days after it anchored in the Delaware River.
The ship set sail again, and eventually the remaining 10,000 tons of ash were, according to the captain of the ship, dumped into the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.
In 2002, 2,500 tons of the ash that were initially dumped in Haiti made its way to a landfill in Franklin County — 160 miles from Philadelphia.
We know that our unwanted items, which we dutifully put in plastic trash bags that are carted from our vision, don’t vanish. In the United States, most trash still goes to landfills, where it becomes a major source of methane emissions. Incineration of trash is more common in the Northeast, where land is at a premium; one third of Philadelphia’s garbage is incinerated in Chester, Delaware County. This produces a slew of toxic gases, which makes its way into the atmosphere and our lungs.
But it isn’t the trash that is disposed of conventionally that we find most vexing. It’s that tiny sliver that doesn’t make it to the landfill or the incinerator that we come face to face with every day, on our streets and in our vacant lots that we call “litter.”
I know the feeling of despair litter can bring. For awhile when I was commuting on the El, on the walk home I would have to look at swirls of detritus — piles of bottles, chip bags and candy wrappers — and even imagined the title of an art project documenting them: “The Trash Gardens of Philadelphia.”
A much more productive response, a heroic one, to litter can be found in the work of Andrew Wheeler and Rich Guffanti and all of the volunteers who have joined their cause cleaning Cobbs Creek Park. Eastwick resident Olivia Collier monitoring the air because she wants it to be safe for kids to play in her yard is equally valiant.
They are fighting battles that produce victories, but only temporary ones — at least until we reckon with the law of conservation of matter.
