“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is now what we are in the process of doing.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert, “Field Notes From a Catastrophe”

Sometimes pleas and incentives aren’t enough; instead, the force of law is needed.

We’ve written for decades about the city’s Rapp Road landfill, which is used by most of the municipalities we cover.

The same year, 2010, that the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation permitted the dump to make its fifth — and final — expansion into the Pine Bush, we wrote about a plan developed by Clough, Harbour & Associates, spelling out ways to reduce waste going to the landfill. An important one was to educate residents about reducing waste, and about collecting and treating food and yard waste separately from general garbage so they can be composted.

The plan said about a quarter of what goes into the Rapp Road landfill would be able to be composted instead — the goal was to accomplish that by 2018. We’re nowhere close.

In a comprehensive story last week, our reporter Elizabeth Floyd Mair looked at the dilemma faced by Albany County as its two landfills — the city of Albany’s on Rapp Road and the town of Colonie’s in Colonie — are rapidly nearing capacity. Colonie wants to build higher, and Rapp Road already dominates our local landscape; driving west on Washington Avenue Extension, motorists see a mountain of garbage looming on the horizon. We’d like to see a different kind of monument to our humanity.

The key, plain and simple, is to discard less. For decades, we’ve written in this space about the wonders of compost — the alchemy of transforming waste into “black gold,” useful fertilizer.

Consider these facts:

— Every year, Americans throw away 24 million tons of leaves and grass; leaves alone can account for 75 percent of the solid waste in the fall;

— The average American family produces more than 1,200 pounds of organic garbage every year; about 70 percent of the garbage Americans create is compostable;

— Organic waste buried in a landfill releases explosive methane gas, a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to air pollution and climate change.

But pleas are not enough. Few individuals compost on their own. We commend the town of Bethlehem for instituting a pilot program this spring in which a private company collects food scraps curbside, taking the scraps to the town’s facility where they are combined with yard waste, long collected by the town,  and processed into compost.

The city of Albany, which for years has relied on the Rapp Road landfill as a cash cow covering city expenses, is currently holding a series of meetings to educate Albany residents on such possibilities as a pay-as-you-throw system, meant to reduce the amount of garbage going to a landfill by charging residents for it. This is to encourage residents to recycle more since recyclables aren’t charged for.

Currently, each property in Albany produces an average of 1.5 tons of garbage each year; the diversion rate is just 11 percent, the city says.

Bethlehem’s curbside pickup of food scraps and a pay-as-you-throw initiative are both steps in the right direction, but they are not enough. Why? Because they are optional.

Albany County needs to do what San Francisco has done. By 2000, San Francisco had achieved the 50-percent diversion rate required by California state law, but the city then set a goal of diverting 75 percent by 2010 and producing zero waste by 2020. According to the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s “Zero-Waste Case Study: San Francisco, CA,”  this conserves resources, reduces climate change and pollution, and creates green jobs.

Reducing waste so drastically took legislation — a law requiring both residents and businesses to comply. The law was passed in 2009.

“Zero waste,” San Francisco policy says, “means products are designed and used according to the waste reduction hierarchy (prevent waste, reduce and reuse first, then recycle and compost) and the principle of highest and best use, so no material goes to landfill or high-temperature destruction.”

Each resident and business has three bins — a blue bin for recyclables, a green bin for compostables, and a black bin for material going to the landfill. The charge for residential customers subscribing to weekly collection of 32-gallon black, blue, and green bins totals $35.18 per month. If the household uses smaller bins, the rate decreases.

The program is funded entirely from money generated from refuse rates charged to customers, which covers material collection, processing, disposal, hazardous waste collections, and outreach and marketing materials. Recyclables are baled and sold to their respective markets and the compostables are processed and transformed into nutrient-rich compost, which is sold to local farms. Landfill-bound materials are processed less but are charged by weight and dumped in the landfill with no return on investment.

San Francisco, according to the EPA case study, has achieved the highest diversion rate of any major city in North America. In 2010, San Francisco diverted 80 percent or 1.6 million tons of its discards from the landfill.

Beyond that, the study says that 1.1 million jobs would be created if the United States diverted 75 percent from its landfills. So the program is not only good for conserving landfill space and helping the environment but also for the economy.

Our planet is at the tipping point. Greenhouse gases like methane — which is far more potent than carbon dioxide — once released in the Earth’s atmosphere allow incoming sunlight to pass through them but absorb heat radiated back from the Earth’s surface. Storms are getting bigger, heat waves are getting longer, glaciers are melting faster, and the ocean is rising.

We Americans need to change our wasteful ways. We produce far more waste, per capita, than any other industrialized country. The United States, per capita, is the leading contributor to global warming at 30.3 percent — nearly a third.

Our president has turned away from the Paris Accord that united most of the world in trying to save our planet. Individual states, like New York and California, are trying to fill the gap. We here in Albany County must do our part.

Rather than looking to expand the landfill in Colonie or to regionalize for a bigger landfill elsewhere, the county needs to pass laws that required people to do what needs to be done — divert the waste that can be recycled or used productively as compost. San Francisco provides a workable model that we can follow.

If our Earth is to survive, we need radical change in both senses of the word: getting to the root of the problem and effecting fundamental revolutionary change.

Dealing responsibly with our garbage is a good place to start. It’s one way to fulfill the mantra: Think globally, act locally.