Putting Out the Garbage
Interesting place, America.
Each year we bury over 400 million tons of municipal garbage. Over a ton per person. Forty pounds a week for every one of us, out to the curb. At the same time, we're publicly and politically in a dither over alternative energy sources. How much sense does it make to dig holes in America and shove garbage into them? Decomposing, it leaches into the groundwater or escapes as methane.
A lot of what we pitch out (plastic and such) is, essentially, here with us forever. We're creating a sort of kitchen-sink time capsule for the survivors of our species to dig up in future millennia and ponder.
Meanwhile, over in good old decadent, outmoded, backward and irrelevant Europe, according to a recent article by Elisabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times;
Waste incineration plants "have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark, from wealthy exurbs . . . to Copenhagen’s downtown area. Their use has not only reduced the country’s e…