In looking at the many future changes facing the whole world today, we cannot possibly fail to forget that one of our biggest hidden domestic problems is the fact that we are all being drowned by our garbage — and there is literally little space left for us to discard it.

Global waste has already reached about three billion tons with only 10 per cent currently being recycled. About 90 per cent of our rubbish internationally has to be sent to landfill but we are already running out of available and acceptable space for it.

This horrifying set of circumstances is very much on the increase, even now in the poorer developing countries. Waste disposal methods used there are often environmentally questionable and generally involve ignorance, a lack of finance, technological know-how and hands-on experience.

In a nutshell, industry and commerce everywhere around our globe are producing packaging and other materials for just about everything we now buy. But we consumers generally glibly throw this rubbish away in our household and street bins, thinking we have thankfully disposed of it all. The same, of course, goes for our mounting food scraps.

When considering this unfortunate state of affairs, even more important, however, is our overall lack of personal forethought in knowing where our waste will end up and how it impacts the good health of all people, our environment and our biosphere.

To really get a grip on our growing problem, I spoke with a respected Australian and Northern New South Wales retired academic, civil environmental and local government engineer, Rex Glencross-Grant, now living in Yamba.

In his words of considerable experience, this expert in the field knows only too well that we in Northern New South Wales are already experiencing a limited capacity for garbage landfill.

He points out how vital it is that more waste reduction methods are identified as soon as possible and put into action before we literally start drowning in our own waste.

As Grant points out, our affluent Western developed countries, including Australia, produce the world’s greatest amounts of solid waste having to be handled by our local government councils — and we all are expected to produce an even bigger proportion of this garbage in the years immediately ahead.

Although landfill and incineration are the most widely used solutions to the current disposal problem in the West, Grant believes it is now absolutely imperative that all we shoppers must become far more responsible when disposing of our household, working place and personal rubbish.

On the other hand, he believes that local, State or Federal authorities have to urgently find and support the development of new techniques to reduce all that we throw out, so often with abandon. One of his earnest desires is that our mountains of waste should be industrially recycled to provide us with more essential resources. As he explains, one man’s waste should be another man’s income.

In considering this urgent need, Grant points to the way that Japan has already taken on the challenge of garbage disposal by invoking a new technology to turn plastics into energy-providing oil.

By using cutting-edge high-efficiency oil production techniques, a leading Japanese company, Environment Energy, is set to process 20,000 tons of plastic trash a year, turning it into crude oil.

The enormous environmental hazards associated with the accumulation of plastic waste have apparently been fully recognised in Japan where a million disposable plastic bottles are bought every minute of every day.

The presence of plastic in our rubbish is not, however, the only problem. Discarded glass, certain metals and items made from rubber are just as dangerous to handlers and the environment. Even worse are detergents and used car and other batteries.

My informant claims that we in Australia and elsewhere have a sad lack of awareness about how we should be recycling garbage. The fact that our population is expanding is also making the landfill situation even worse.

I learned that official statistics show that Australia is in the unenviable position of currently having the second highest per head of population municipal waste generation in the O.E.C.D. countries — and possibly throughout our globe.

As Rex Glencross-Grant explains, we all have to make sure we don’t go from a state of poor waste management decadence to a state of eventual possible decay amidst mounting deposits of our rubbish. He was also heard to murmur “waste not, want not.”