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Thursday, June 6, 2002 |
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"A clever person fixes a problem; a wise one avoids it"
I'm working on a story on garbage where it goes, from the curb to landfill. Bulk. Think bulk on an unthinkable scale. Tons and tons of garbage, sorted thru and dumped. There's the #1 plastic sorter, the street people and their glass-filled shopping carts, the huge trailor trash trucks on the highway, workers sorting though piles for wood and cardboard, 100,000 pound compactor rolling machines with teeth on the bottom. An amazing flurry of activity with a fascinating hidden (yet everywhere if you look) sub-culture of it's own. I thought it'd be just a stinking pit run by a bunch of thoughtless folks, but at least in Berkeley, there's a lot of intelligent thought and care that goes into minimizing landfill. There's always holes to fill, as one of the people I talked to said. But we are running out of our feed material, and at some point we'll have to start mining our garbage for materials!!! The most obvious solution is to force the manufacturers to take responsibility for the packaging (think plastics, think nasty dioxins and pcbs, think computers and the tons and tons of toxic waste in each one), and to set up a way to re-use them. |
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