Introduction
Garbage 101

Garbage is a dirty business. And as anyone who has ever lived near or visited a landfill will tell you, it is also a smelly business. In the U.S., a country that is blessed with many wide-open spaces, garbage has always been a "somebody else's" business, as well. For most of our history, we have treated garbage the same way: dump it somewhere away from our towns and cities. For cities near the ocean, this has meant dumping it at sea, or possibly close to shore if land was being reclaimed. For inland cities, this has resulted in burying it in open pits. As long as the citizens of the cities or towns did not have to see it, there was no problem.

As cities and towns grew, and as the products that went into the waste stream became more toxic, concern began to escalate. The growing cities meant that people were moving out closer to the dumps, and that the amount of waste that was going to the dump was expanding. The increasing toxicity of products going into the dumps meant that local groundwaters were becoming polluted with leachate that had passed through the landfill. With growing legal issues and tougher environmental laws on pollution of groundwater, changes in how garbage is disposed of have been taking place over the last several decades. A modernized landfill, with barriers to leachate and methane recovery systems, is a vast improvement to the old style dump.

Recycling

But even a modernized landfill does not get to the heart of the matter. As long as people continue to produce garbage at the rate that they are, we are going to continue to run out of places to put it. In high-density population centers along the northestern seaboard, this situation is becoming more critical every day. Nothing better epitomizes the situation in this area than the barge full of trash from Long Island in 1987 that could not find any takers. After a 3,000-mile trip down the eastern seaboard and into Mexico, the barge had to be returned to New York because no other city or state would allow the shipment to be dumped in their landfill. While the situation in Long Island has improved, other municipalities find themselves in similar situations today.

The solution to this problem of what to do with waste is rather simple: reduce, reuse, and recycle. This simplistic mantra is really quite powerful, but it takes a change in lifestyle. Usually, the change only comes about when the situation becomes critical. In high population density areas such as Japan and certain countries in Europe, systems of laws and fee penalties exist to force the citizens to limit how much garbage they throw away. This causes people to reconsider how much packaging is involved when they buy something and to recycle as much of their waste as possible. This situation is beginning to occur in the U.S., as well. As we can see in the Long Island garbage barge story, the shutting down of all landfills in 1990 and the refusal of other communities to take their garbage forced the local system into greater recycling (about 35% of the waste is now recycled).

The sites below contain information on solid waste and recycling.

Solid Waste

Office of Solid Waste (EPA)
Landfill Regulations (EPA)
State Agencies

Recycling

National Recycling Coalition
Recycling (EPA)
Waste Wise

After reading through these and any other sites that you might find, answer the following questions