When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.”

-Jesus in John 6:12 NIV Bible  

We may recycle newspapers and glass and take proper satisfaction for doing so, but we remain caught in a web of spiritual assumptions about success and consumption, progress and waste that effectively undermine and trivialize our efforts to escape.

-William H. Becker, "Ecological Sin," Theology Today, 1992

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

-New England proverb  

In a society where we think of so many things as disposable, where we expect to be constantly discarding last year's gadget and replacing it with this year's model, do we end up tempted to think of people and relationships as disposable? ...if we live in a context where we construct everything from computers to buildings to relationships on the assumption that they'll need to be replaced before long, what have we lost? ...God is involved in building to last …He doesn't give up on the material of human lives ...and He asks us to approach one another and our physical world with the same commitment ... God doesn't do 'waste'

-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams,
New Year’s Message posted on YouTube 31 Dec 07

Total [U.S. Municipal Solid Waste] generation in 2006 was 251 million tons. Organic materials continue to be the largest component of MSW. Paper and paperboard products account for 34 percent, with yard trimmings and food scraps accounting for 25 percent. Plastics comprise 12 percent; metals make up 8 percent; and rubber, leather, and textiles account for 7 percent. Wood follows at 6 percent, and glass at 5 percent. Other miscellaneous wastes made up approximately 3 percent of the MSW generated in 2006.

-EPA: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal 
in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006

In the United States, we generated approximately 229.9 million tons of MSW in 1999 – an increase of 6.9 million tons from 1998. This is about a 3 percent increase in waste generation from 1998. Excluding composting, the amount of MSW recycled increased to 50.8 million tons, an increase of 2.4 million tons. This is a 5 percent increase in the tons recycled since 1998. The tons recovered for recycling (including composting) rose to 64 million tons in 1999, up from 62 million tons in 1998. The recovery rate for recycling (including composting) was 27.8 percent in 1999, up from 27.6 percent in 1998.

-U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 1999 Facts and Figures
 

In 1997 we gave a collective heave-ho to more than 430 billion lbs. of garbage. That means each man, woman and child tossed out an average of nearly 1,600 lbs. of banana peels, Cheerios boxes, gum wrappers, Coke cans, ratty sofas, TIME magazines, car batteries, disposable diapers, yard trimmings, junk mail, worn-out Nikes--plus whatever else goes into your trash cans. An equivalent weight of water could fill 68,000 Olympic-size pools.

-Ivan Amato, Can We Make Garbage Disappear
in Visions of the 21st Century from Time.Com  

There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.

-Mother Teresa (1910-1997), A Gift for God, 1975  

Increases in waste generation since 1960 have historically been correlated with increased economic activity as measured by gross domestic product and personal consumption expenditures. During time of increased economic activity consumers continue to purchase and discard goods at a rate that leads to constant waste growth. Estimates show that for every pound of product purchased by a consumer, many more pounds of waste are generated by the industrial process used to make that product.

-Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance,
1999 The Solid Waste Policy Report  

We are not to throw away those things which can benefit our neighbor. Goods are called good because they can be used for good: they are instruments for good, in the hands of those who use them properly.

-Clement of Alexandria (150?-220?)  

We are recycling not only to protect the environment, but for economic reasons as well. Disposal is simply too costly and too dangerous. The challenge is to redirect the flow of raw materials going to landfill into strengthening our declining local economies. The solution to pollution is self-reliant cities and counties.

-Neil Seldman, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 1990  

…as long as there are some people who wish to believe and are economically empowered to believe that they are too good the do their own work and clean up after themselves, then somebody else is going to have to do the work and the cleaning up. In an exploitive economy, there is what we might call a "nigger factor" that will remain more or less constant. If some people grow rich by making things to throw away, then many other people will have to empty the garbage cans and make the trip to the dump.

-Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, 1989  

Nothing “goes away”; it is simply transferred from place to place, converted from one molecular form to another, acting on the life processes of any organism in which it becomes, for a time, lodged. One of the chief reasons for the present environmental crisis is that great amounts of material have been extracted from the earth, converted into new forms, and discharged into the environment without taking into account that “everything has to go somewhere.” The result, too often, is the accumulation of harmful amounts of material in places where, in nature, they do not belong.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971  

One of the striking facts about the chemistry of living systems is that for every organic substance produced by a living organism, there exists, somewhere in nature, an enzyme capable of breaking that substance down. In effect, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is thus enforced. Thus, when new man-made organic substance is synthesized with a molecular structure that departs significantly from the types which occur in nature, it is probable that no degradation enzyme exists, and the material tends to accumulate.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971  

We've discovered that while shoppers are treated like kings and queens, discarders are directed to alleyways, shown to back doors, and sometimes turned away. While shopping is social and recreational, donating often feels more like an illicit act: Back up to the thrift store loading dock, press a buzzer on the locked warehouse door, haul out the boxes, and drive away as fast as possible.

-Paul Boyer, “My quest: to live with less,” 
Christian Science Monitor, 30 Oct 03

Trash: there are no rugs left to sweep it under.

-Milwaukee Journal, 19 Apr 70  

A rind is a terrible thing to waste. Compost.

- Bumper sticker

There appears to be a deeply embedded uneasiness in our culture about throwing away junk that can be reused. Perhaps, in part, it is guilt about consumption. Perhaps it also feels unnatural. Mother Nature doesn't throw stuff away. Dead trees, birds, beetles and elephants are pretty quickly recycled by the system.

-William Booth, "EPA Sets Recycling Goal"
The Washington Post, 5 Jan 00  

Moreover, a close inspection of our countryside would reveal, strewn over it from one end to the other, thousands of derelict and worthless automobiles, house trailers, refrigerators, stoves, freezers, washing machines, and dryers; as well as thousands of unregulated dumps in hollows and sink holes, on streambanks and roadsides, filled not only with "disposable" containers but also with broken toasters, television sets, toys of all kinds, furniture, lamps, stereos, radios, scales, coffee makers, mixers, blenders, corn poppers, hair dryers, and microwave ovens. Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

-Wendell Berry, "Waste," What Are People For? 1990  

The case for recycling is strong. The bottom line is clear. Recycling requires a trivial amount of our time. Recycling saves money and reduces pollution. Recycling creates more jobs than landfilling or incineration. And a largely ignored but very important consideration, recycling reduces our need to dump our garbage in someone else's backyard.

-David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance,
Recycling and the New York Times 30 Jul 96 

The United States hosts 56,061 recycling and reuse establishments that employ approximately 1.1 million people, generate an annual payroll of $37 billion, and gross $236 billion in annual revenues.… The recycling and reuse industry is comparable to the auto and truck manufacturing industry, and is significantly larger than mining and waste management and disposal. Wages for workers in the recycling are notably higher than the national average for all industries.

-National Recycling Coalition, "The Power of Partnerships,"
NRC News-wire November 2001  

This country must make every effort to stem the rising tide of garbage and industrial waste through a more aggressive use of waste minimization and recycling practices. America as a nation is filling landfills faster than it can establish new ones. The waste problem is not going away, and it can no longer be neglected.

-George Bush, 41st President of the United States,
Message to Congress, 23 Jun 89  

The greatest economic benefit of recycling is that it provides a base of materials for robust, efficient manufacturing industries. So far this decade, U.S. paper manufacturers have voluntarily built more than 45 recycling-based pulp and paper mills and only a handful that use virgin wood. This is not just because recycling plants are better for the environment, but because they are a less expensive way to increase production, taking advantage of the increasing supplies of used paper collected in business and community recycling programs.

-Richard A. Denison & John F. Ruston, Anti-Recycling Myths
Environmental Defense 18 Jul 96  

As long as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a space ship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed. In what we might call the "old days," when man was small in numbers and earth was large, he could pollute it with impunity, though even then he frequently destroyed his immediate environment and had to move on to a new spot, which he then proceeded to destroy. Now man can no longer do this; he must live in the whole system, in which he must recycle his wastes and really face up to the problem of the increase in material entropy which his activities create. In a space ship there are no sewers.

-Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993) "Earth as a Spaceship" 10 May 65  

As early as the 1980s, a United Church of Christ report on race and toxic wastes found that “race was the best predictor of the location of hazardous waste facilities in the United States. According to the report, 40 percent of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste landfill capacity was located in three predominately African American and Hispanic communities. And the largest landfill in the nation was found in Sumter County, Alabama, where nearly 70 percent of its seventeen thousand residents are Black and 96 percent are poor.

-James H. Cone, “One Earth, One Struggle,” The Other Side, Jan-Feb 2004

If hazardous materials are not fit to be disposed of in the suburbs, they are certainly not fit to be disposed of in the cities.  If toxic waste is not safe enough to be dumped in the United States , it is not safe enough to be dumped in Ghana , Liberia , Somalia , nor anywhere else in the world.

-Church leader cited by James H. Cone 
in “One Earth, One Struggle,” The Other Side, Jan-Feb 2004

…a landfill-based system presents substantial long-term risks of increased water and air pollution. Landfills are often viewed as nuisances in communities, they provide few jobs to the local economy, and may depress surrounding property values. Once a landfill closes, the land has limited use for future development. Thus, the social costs of shifting to a landfill based system are great, especially in communities.

-Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance,
1999 The Solid Waste Policy Report  

Wisdom understands that in a world of ecological interconnectedness there is no such things as “away.” We don’t throw things “away,” we simply put them someplace where they defile the land, foul the water, pollute the air or change the earth’s atmosphere.

-Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat, 
Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, 2004

Babies born to mothers living near landfill sites are more likely to suffer minor birth defects, a study has shown. The government-backed research also showed that 80% of the population lived within 2km of a landfill site. The study, due to be published in the British Medical Journal on Friday, shows that pregnant women have a 1% higher risk of having a baby with a congenital defect, if they live near a landfill site. On average 153 babies per 10,000 are born with birth defects… Those living near landfill sites containing hazardous waste were at a 7% higher risk of having a baby with congenital defects.

-BBC News Online, "Birth defect link to landfill sites," 16 Aug 01  

Women living within three kilometers (two miles) of a hazardous waste landfill site have a 40 percent greater risk of conceiving a child with a chromosomal birth defect, such as Down's syndrome, concludes a new study published today in the medical journal "The Lancet." The findings are a companion to 1998 results suggesting a 33 percent increase in the risk of non-chromosomal birth anomalies such as spina bifida. Both studies were carried out under the European Commission funded "Eurohazcon" project, and involved epidemiological research in the vicinities of 23 landfills accepting hazardous waste in Denmark, Italy, Belgium, France and England.

-Environment News Service,
"Toxic Waste Landfills Pose Birth Defect Risks,"
London, 25 Jan 02  

Minnesota, by not siting landfills, is not allowing for the laws of physics. You can't destroy matter. Even with incineration, they just reduce the volume

-John Kellas, regional landfill manager for Waste Management Inc.
quoted in Star Tribune 26 Feb 01  

For every ton of plastic, newspaper, aluminum and tin recycled by conscientious Wisconsinites to help keep waste out of state landfills, nearly two tons of household garbage is trucked to Wisconsin from others states and dumped here. When legislators passed the state's recycling law in 1990, one of its key goals was to slow the rate at which Wisconsin landfills were being filled up with garbage to delay the need for new landfills and expansions of existing ones. Recycling has accomplished that to a certain extent; however, now state landfills are being filled with trash from Illinois, Minnesota and other states… The 1.4 million tons of garbage trucked to Wisconsin from other states and dumped here in 1999 surpassed the previous year's record of 1.2 million tons. The number has tripled since 1993.

-Amy Rinard, "Impact of recycling blunted,"
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 29 Apr 01  

Garbage is like water, it's going to go to the lowest point.

-Larry Balow, Wisconsin state representative, quoted in "Impact of recycling blunted,"
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 29 Apr 01  

With its landfill sites almost full, Japan launched a plan last week to halve the amount of trash it buries by 2010.  Though some other affluent countries produce more trash per capita in weight terms, the Japanese fondness for elaborate packaging leaves it with a lot of bulky waste and nowhere to put it.  The idea is to reduce the amount of waste buried from 56 million tonnes in 2002 to 28 million tonnes by 2010 by recycling more and promoting conservation, the Environment Ministry said.  "We are running out of places to bury our trash," said an official at the Environment Ministry, adding that objections from local people made it difficult to develop new waste disposal sites.          

- Reuters News Service, 
Overflowing Japan tries to put a lid on trash, 17 Mar 03 

Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.

-William McDonough and Michael Braungart
in "The NEXT Industrial Revolution"
Atlantic Monthly, October '98  

The production of waste and pollution represents inefficiency, lost resources and a long-term economic burden for communities required to manage, treat, remediate, detoxify, or control these wastes. The result is not only environmental degradation, but degradation of our economy and quality of life. The true cost of managing materials at the end of their life is generally not reflected in the costs of producing the materials. The result is the taxpayer, rather than the producer or user of the product, may pay for disposal part of the true cost of the product. Industrial development often occurs without significant attention to the full environmental impacts of the resulting activity on our environment or natural resource consumption. Businesses often do not realize the full economic impact of managing waste materials.

-Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance,
1999 The Solid Waste Policy Report  

In 1997, a total of 217 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) was generated in the U.S., according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (Washington) July 1999 report...Up from 209 million tons in 1996, this total equals 4.4 pounds per person per day. Of this, 22.4 percent (48.6 million tons) was recovered for recycling, 5.6 percent (12.1 million tons) was composted, and 72 percent (156.3 miliion tons) was discarded. Landfilling accounted for 55.1 percent (119.6 million tons) of the total, while combustion accounted for 16.9 percent (36.7 million tons).

"EPA Announces National Recovery Rate"
from Resource Recycling, October '99  

But when nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted. Once the values of things refer only to their future usefulness, then an infinite withdrawal of value from the living present has begun. Nothing (and nobody) can then exist that is not theoretically replaceable by something (or somebody) more valuable. The country that we (or some of us) had thought to make our home becomes instead 'a nation rich in natural resources'; the good bounty of the land begins its mechanical metamorphosis into junk, garbage, silt, poison, and other forms of 'waste.' "The inevitable result of such an economy is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime's devotion. 'Waste,' in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans--the unborn, the old, 'disinvested' farmers, the unemployed, the 'unemployable.' Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ashheap or the dump.

-Wendell Berry, Home Economics, 1995  

More than 150 million Americans recycle at home or work - more than vote in national elections… But at the same time, the amount of trash in garbage cans at homes and offices increased by 4.4 million tons - or 6% - from 1996 to 1997… while recycling leveled off, increasing just 1% during that period. ''Even though we are recycling a greater portion of our discards, we still are burying and burning more materials than 20 years ago,'' wrote report authors Neil Seldman and Brenda Platt of the non-profit Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which prepared the study for the recycling network. Since 1980, garbage buried in landfills or burned in incinerators has grown by 19.2 million tons, the report says.

–Erin Kelly, "Americans recycling but garbage piles up"
USA Today 26 Mar 00  

... if the society toward which we are developing is not to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must use the interlude of the present era to develop a new technology which is based on a circular flow of materials such that the only sources of man's provisions will be his own waste products.

-Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993) Economics as a Science, 1970  

The recycling process has worked smoothly to date - the real process of adjustment less so. Let us not delude ourselves: financial flows cannot fill indefinitely a gap that must be covered by conservation, production, and new forms of energy. Our past success in recycling - and the role it can play today - must not lead us to stretch that process to the breaking point.

-Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System
quoted in Wriston, Risk and Other Four Letter Words  

It´s an illusion that the solution to pollution is dilution!

-Unknown
contributed by Pär-Erik Back, Sweden  

"Solid wastes" are the discarded leftovers of our advanced consumer society. This growing mountain of garbage and trash represents not only an attitude of indifference toward valuable natural resources, but also a serious economic and public health problem.

-Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States,
Message to the Congress, 23 May 77  

There is a large part of the central Pacific Ocean that no one ever visits and only a few ever pass through… Surprisingly, this is the largest ocean realm on our planet, being about the size of Africa -- over ten million square miles… Because of the stability of this gentle maelstrom, the largest uniform climatic feature on earth is also an accumulator of the debris of civilization. Anything that floats, no matter where it comes from on the north Pacific Rim or ocean, ends up here, sometimes after drifting around the periphery for twelve years or more. Historically, this debris did not accumulate because it was eventually broken down by microorganisms into carbon dioxide and water. Now, however, in our battle to store goods against natural deterioration, we have created a class of products that defeats even the most creative and insidious bacteria. They are plastics. Plastics are now virtually everywhere in our modern society. We drink out of them, eat off of them, sit on them, and even drive in them. They’re durable, lightweight, cheap, and can be made into virtually anything. But it is these useful properties of plastics, which make them so harmful when they end up in the environment. Plastics, like diamonds, are forever! If plastic doesn’t biodegrade, what does it do? It “photo-degrades” – a process in which it is broken down by sunlight into smaller and smaller pieces, all of which are still plastic polymers, eventually becoming individual molecules of plastic, still too tough for anything to digest. For the last fifty-odd years, every piece of plastic that has made it from our shores to the Pacific Ocean, has been breaking down and accumulating in the central Pacific gyre.

-Capt. Charles Moore, Algalita Marine Research Foundation, 
“World's Largest 'Landfill' is in the Middle of the Ocean” 1 Nov 02

But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom—a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom—and all of us are involved in it.

-Wendell Berry, "Waste," What Are People For? 1990  

The ever-mounting glut of waste materials is characteristic by-product of modern "consumer society." It might even be argued that capitalism's continual need to find of generate markets means that disposibility and waste have become the spine of the system. To consume means, literally, "to destroy or expend," and in the garbage crisis we confront the underlying truth of a society in which enormous productive capacities and market forces have harnessed human needs and desires, without regard to the long or even short-term future of life on the planet.

-Stuart Ewen from Utne Reader, Sept/Oct 1989  

It's time we stopped turning up our noses at the nation's garbage dumps and started appreciating them for what they really are -- the municipal mines, forests, oil wells and energy sources of the future!

-Max Spendlove, quoted in National Civic Review, February '72 *  

Construction will begin soon on three plants that will convert landfill gas into electricity. The plants will be the first of their kind in Kentucky. Instead of coal, they will burn methane and other landfill gases to generate electricity.  East Kentucky Power Cooperative will build the plants at the Bavarian Landfill in Boone County, the Laurel Ridge Landfill in Laurel County and the Green Valley Landfill in Greenup County.  Each of the 5,000-square-foot plants will cost $4 million and generate a combined 10 megawatts of power. That's enough, East Kentucky Power says, to supply power to all the homes in two cities the size of Shelbyville.  The gas is produced by decaying trash. It now escapes into the the atmosphere, where it becomes a greenhouse gas and possibly contributes to global warming.  "We're exploring every avenue we can to reduce coal emissions," East Kentucky Power spokesman Kevin Osbourne said. "This is just another way of doing that. Plus, not only is it good for the environment, the cost compares very well." Converting landfill gas into electricity costs more than converting coal, however, and that cost is passed on to customers through the co-op's EnviroWatts program.          

-Andy Mead “Landfill gas will fuel electricity production,” Lexington Herald-Leader, 18 Mar 03  

Proportionally, as compared to recycling and resource recovery, (Minnesota) landfilling increased by 4 percent from 1995 to 1998. If the waste generation continues to grow, and if there are no increases in reduction, recycling and resource recovery systems, approximately 70 million tons of MSW will have to be landfilled through 2020, and as much as 1,200 acres of land would be consumed in Minnesota. By 2013, landfilling will become Minnesota's predominant waste management method. Minnesota has sufficient existing landfill capacity to handle this waste increase until the year 2010. If the disposal trends continue, existing landfills will have to be expanded and new landfills will have to be sited. The siting of these new landfills would have to begin as early as 2005. By the year 2020 landfills would consume 100 or more acres in Minnesota land per year. This scenario would have a tremendous fiscal, political and resource impact on all

-Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance,
1999 The Solid Waste Policy Report  

Approximately 72 percent of the waste currently being landfilled or incinerated consists of materials that could be put to higher and better use through recycling or composting. Most of this material is office paper, cardboard, non-recyclable paper, and food waste.

-Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance,
2002 The Solid Waste Policy Report

Scientists surveyed Ohio soil profiles and found that at least 55 of Ohio's 88 counties have underground fractures that could affect the purity of ground water. "We once thought that the soils in much of Ohio were so fine-grained and tightly compacted that almost no wastes could seep through," said Ann Christy, an assistant professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State University. "However, now we're finding that is not true." Much of Ohio was seen as a safe place for landfills because of the presence of glacial tills - the soil, rocks and other material left behind by glaciers that covered much of the state during the last ice age, Christy said. While scientists once thought these glacial tills were nearly impermeable to wastes, the discovery of fractures in these tills is giving researchers second thoughts.

-Ohio State Research, “Ancient underground fractures may threaten 
ground water supplies,” Ohio State University, 22 Dec 00

Pressure-treated lumber has enough toxic chemicals in it to qualify as hazardous waste. But years ago, industry lobbyists in Washington secured an exemption from hazardous waste laws. Because of that, tons of treated wood decks and playgrounds that wear out can be dumped in unlined landfills. Now, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is concerned that the leaking arsenic poses a threat to drinking water. At the West Pasco landfill, for example, tests in the mid 1990s showed arsenic levels 1 1/2 times the level the state considers safe for drinking water. The wood-treatment industry's trade association says the state tests don't prove that the arsenic is coming from treated wood. The DEP predicts the problem only will get worse. The tonnage of pressure-treated lumber going to landfills is expected to increase seven-fold over the next 25 years.

-Julie Hauserman, “Arsenic fears rise over treated wood disposal” 
St. Petersburg Times, 11 Mar 01

The United States alone is now saving about one exajoule of energy - about one percent of total U.S. energy use - each year by recycling municipal solid waste.

- John E. Young from "The Sudden New Strength of Recycling"
in World Watch, 1995  

Waste is a terrible thing to mind -- Recycle

-U.S. bumper sticker  

What would be a just wage for a life of carrying off other people's cans and bottles? A million dollars a year would not be enough, because such a job can be performed only by the forfeiture of the effective life of the spirit in this world. Such work is not, in the usual sense, an accomplishment. It is not productive work. The only conceivable standard for it is quantitative; it can be done thoroughly or not; one can haul off either all the cans and bottles or only some of them. It is work that by its nature cannot be good work; though it can be done carefully, it cannot be well done. There is no art in it, no science, and no skill. It's only virtue is in its necessity. But it is necessary only for a bad reason: the manufacture of "disposable" (that is, virtually worthless) products. The people for whom this work is for will be made unhappy or unhealthy if it is not done. So long at is done, they will scarcely think of it. It is work, then, then that is entirely negative in its value. Its most desirable result is to leave no visible trace.

-Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, 1989  

In the meantime it must be remembered that while recycling is one valuable way of coping with America's - or any society's - solid waste, it is by no means a panacea. Yes, from a narrow, technical perspective almost anything that one might find in municipal solid waste could be thought of as being somehow recyclable or reusable; the problem is finding significant outlets for such recycled or reused products that also make economic, political, environmental, and psychological sense.

-William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish!, 1992  

Between 170 and 190 incinerators operate at any given time in the United States. They handle about 17 percent of the nation's trash. Any respectable recycling program would easily put them all out of business.

-Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream, 1997  

No matter how you look at it, scooping garbage into an oven and setting it afire is an equally primitive alternative to digging a hole in the ground and burying it. The former contaminates air; the latter, groundwater.

-Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream, 1997

No matter how improved or what they are called, incinerators present two problems that landfills do not.  First, incinerators only transform garbage; they don’t provide a final resting place for it.  There remains the question of where to put the ashes.  Second, these cavernous furnaces create, out of ordinary garbage they are stoked with, new species of toxic chemicals.  In addition to producing electricity, they generate hazardous waste.

-Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream, 1997    

The indestructibility of matter reigns supreme. Moreover, the process of burning concentrates into the ash whatever hazardous materials are present in the original refuse. Heavy metals, such as mercury, lead, and cadmium, for example, are not destroyed by fire. Occurring as ingredients in household batteries, lightbulbs, paints, dyes, and thermometers, they are absolutely persistent. Air pollution control depends on the ability of an incinerator’s cooling chambers to condense these metals into fine particles, which are then caught in special filters. Once again, the irony of trade-offs becomes readily apparent: the less air pollution, the more toxic the ash. An incinerator burning eighteen boxcars of trash per day, for example, produces about ten truckloads of ashes per day. The trucks must then rumble out onto the highways, hauling their poisonous cargo through all kinds of weather. Once ensconced in special burying grounds, incinerator ash, of course, presents a hazard to groundwater.

-Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream, 1997  

The mound...covers three thousand acres and in places rises more than 155 feet above a low-lying island. Its mass, estimated at 100 million tons, and its volume, estimated at 2.9 billion cubic feet, make it one of the largest man-made structures in North America...The site was Fresh Kills landfill, on Staten island, in New York City, a repository of garbage that, when shut down in the year 2005, will have reached a height of 505 feet above sea level, making it the highest geographic feature along a fifteen-hundred-mile stretch of the Atlantic seaboard running north from Florida all the way to Maine.

-William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish!, 1992  

Fresh Kills Landfill is located on the western shore of Staten Island. Approximately half the 2,200-acre landfill is composed of four mounds, or sections, identified as 1/9, 2/8, 3/4 and 6/7 which range in height from 90 feet to approximately 225 feet. These mounds are the result of more than 50 years of landfilling, primarily household waste. Two of the four mounds are fully capped and closed; the other two are being prepared for final capping and closure. Fresh Kills is a highly engineered site, with numerous systems put in place to protect public health and environmental safety. However, roughly half the site has never been filled with garbage or was filled more than twenty years ago. These flatter areas and open waterways host everything from landfill infrastructure and roadways to intact wetlands and wildlife. The potential exists for these areas, and eventually, the mounds themselves, to support broader and more active uses. With effective preparation now, the city can, over time, transform this controversial site into an important asset for Staten Island, the city and the region.

-New York City web site, Fresh Kills: Landfill to Landscape, 2003 

Mr. Thompson calls the waiter, orders steak and baked potater
But he leaves the bone and the gristle and he never eats the skins
Then the bus boy comes and takes it, with a cough contaminates it
As he puts it in a can with coffee grounds and sardine tins
The the truck comes by on Friday and carts it all away
And a thousand trucks just like it are converging on the bay

Oh, garbage! garbage! garbage! garbage!
Garbage! garbage! garbage! garbage!
We're filling up the sea with garbage! garbage! garbage! garbage!
Garbage! garbage! garbage! garbage!
Garbage! garbage! garbage! garbage!
What will we do when there's no place left to put all the garbage?

-Bill Steele from the song "Garbage" 1969  

Source reduction is, on the face it, perhaps the most appealing of all the possible approaches to solid-waste management.

-William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish!, 1992  

...they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

-the prophet Isaiah (c.760-690 B.C.) from Isaiah 2:4
New Revised Standard Version of the Bible

© 2008 University of St. Thomas, Minnesota USA
All rights reserved.