Down In The Dumps - America's Garbage Crisis

<v Speaker 1>Down in the Dumps, America's Garbage Crisis Length 57:55 <v Speaker 1>length with offer 58:13. <v Speaker 1>Closed captioning. Stereo audio, channel one, stereo left, Channel <v Speaker 1>two stereo right. Channel 3 timecode produced at Maryland Public Television. <v Narrator>Funding for this program was provided by the Environmental Protection Agency. <v Narrator>Additional funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

<v Scott Simon>[Man singing blues song] <v Scott Simon>Hello. I'm Scott Simon.

<v Scott Simon>Garbage is one of those ugly, unavoidable facts of life. <v Scott Simon>There's life, death, taxes and garbage. <v Scott Simon>Something we just put into a pail and drag out by the curb and forget. <v Scott Simon>But in the last decade, what we throw away and forget has become a crisis in most parts <v Scott Simon>of this country. A crisis that we can no longer ignore. <v Scott Simon>Over the next hour, we're going to look at the garbage crisis in America. <v Scott Simon>That's what it's become. And see how America can find its way out of <v Scott Simon>down in the dumps. <v Scott Simon>We'll look at why the places where we've put most of our garbage landfills are <v Scott Simon>in short supply. <v Speaker 2>[Men chanting] We've been dumped on enough in this part of the county. <v Speaker 2>Share the burden. <v Scott Simon>Why incinerators upset some environmentalists. <v News Reporter>11 protesters were arrested after they chained themselves to the gates of a garbage <v News Reporter>burning plant. <v Scott Simon>Why shipping trash to other states isn't everybody's idea of a gift. <v Speaker 3>We got nothing but a and trying to make us a dump for the East Coast.

<v Scott Simon>What happens when a family comes face to face with all the garbage they make in a year. <v Scott Simon>And we'll look at some of the creative solutions to this process. <v Scott Simon>I think you'll find that garbage is anything but simple. <v Scott Simon>And just how very complex and even amusing our reaction to <v Scott Simon>our own waste is. <v Scott Simon>First, let's define the problem. We're talking about plain ordinary garbage, the <v Scott Simon>kind we throw away at home in stores, restaurants and at the office, what professionals <v Scott Simon>call municipal solid waste. <v Scott Simon>Americans are thought to produce more garbage than anyone else on this planet. <v Scott Simon>Not talking about our movies or television shows either. <v Scott Simon>According to the Environmental Protection Agency, you and I and every other American <v Scott Simon>generate a little over four pounds of trash a day. <v Scott Simon>That works out to 195 million tons of garbage a year. <v Scott Simon>Just how much trash is that? <v Scott Simon>It's enough to fit a line of 10 ton garbage trucks that would whined around the Earth

<v Scott Simon>nearly five times. <v Speaker 4>Why don't we put all that trash in a rocket and shoot it in outer space? <v Scott Simon>The question we often hear, if even in jest we check with NASA <v Scott Simon>and found that if the space shuttles were used to haul garbage into the heavens, heavens <v Scott Simon>forbid it would require nearly 20000 shuttle launches a day <v Scott Simon>every day of the year to get rid of America's trash. <v Scott Simon>Most Americans had little idea that a garbage crisis was looming until <v Scott Simon>1987, when a barge from Long Island, New York, sailed up and down <v Scott Simon>the Atlantic coast, as far as Central America, vainly trying to find someplace <v Scott Simon>to take its trash, but its refuge was refused. <v Speaker 5>It is moving north. And if it continues on a path, I sound like <v Speaker 5>a hurricane advisory, if it continues on that path, it will strike ?inaudible? <v Speaker 5>City. <v Scott Simon>6000 miles and 76 days later, the barge return to Long Island <v Scott Simon>to dump its odious load.

<v Scott Simon>Another story of rubbish refused occurred in the summer of 1992, <v Scott Simon>when two trash trains from New York City shed simmering in the Midwest because <v Scott Simon>of a contract dispute. <v Speaker 6>We want it out of here and the citizens of this area want it of here. <v Scott Simon>Once again, the trash was ordered home to New York. <v Scott Simon>People were beginning to realize the obvious. <v Scott Simon>We never really throw anything away. <v Scott Simon>We simply throw it someplace else. <v Scott Simon>I'm standing on the world's largest garbage dump, Fresh Kills, Staten <v Scott Simon>Island, New York City. By the time this place closes at the end of the century, <v Scott Simon>it will be the highest point along the East Coast. <v Scott Simon>In terms of sheer volume, the amount of trash that's contained here <v Scott Simon>exceeds the size of the largest structure in the world, the Great Wall of China. <v Scott Simon>If you compare fresh kills to one of the great pyramids of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders <v Scott Simon>of the world, there is no comparison. <v Scott Simon>Fresh Kills is more than 25 times the size of the Great Pyramids.

<v Scott Simon>And it's not clear which will last long. <v Scott Simon>New York City is one of the most prodigious producers of garbage in the world. <v Scott Simon>Twenty six thousand tons a day, 6 days a week, 24 hours a day. <v Scott Simon>Huge barges each holding 600 to 700 tons, are loaded up <v Scott Simon>around the city's 5 boroughs. <v Scott Simon>They're towed to the Fresh Kills landfill, unloaded by giant cranes and the trash <v Scott Simon>hauled in earthmovers to its final dumping place. <v Scott Simon>Dumps have always been the unlovely repositories of what we no longer want. <v Scott Simon>Shunned by humans but attracted to rodents, insects, scavenger birds, and <v Scott Simon>at this landfill in upstate New York, bears, they become a sort of tourist <v Scott Simon>attraction. <v Scott Simon>Dumps often leaked their contents into streams into groundwater. <v Scott Simon>In former days and even in some rural areas today, one of life's chores <v Scott Simon>was taking the garbage to the town dump.

<v Scott Simon>Sometimes the dump became an impromptu community center like malls can be today. <v Speaker 7>I remember that favorite thing I used to do with my father. <v Speaker 7>The most male bonding thing we did was go to the dump and we <v Speaker 7>would win back our pickup truck up to it and start throwing stuff down that hill and <v Speaker 7>watch the trailers or the tractors are all over it. <v Speaker 7>And there is something deeply satisfying about that. <v Scott Simon>Many of these old dumps used to burn the garbage daily. <v Scott Simon>It was a quick way to reduce the volume of trash and preserve landfill space. <v Scott Simon>As late as 1968, this dump in Washington, D.C., burned its trash <v Scott Simon>Levinas smelling haze around the Capitol in 1965. <v Scott Simon>Coughing Congressmen passed the Solid Waste Disposal Act, followed a year <v Scott Simon>later by strict amendments to the Clean Air Act. <v Scott Simon>The practice of open burning would soon end and uncovered leaking dumps <v Scott Simon>were regulated. <v Scott Simon>The laws had another unexpected effect. <v Scott Simon>Many communities decided they could not or would not afford the growing expense <v Scott Simon>and complexity of modern landfills.

<v Scott Simon>They closed their dumps and shipped their trash to somebody else's community. <v Scott Simon>70 percent of the 20,000 dumps that existed in 1978 <v Scott Simon>have closed. <v Scott Simon>Today, there are less than 6,000. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that <v Scott Simon>half of those will close by 1995. <v Scott Simon>The remaining space in landfills is calculated in years til they're filled and for <v Scott Simon>much of the country, the clock is running. <v Scott Simon>Today trash is a major municipal <v Scott Simon>concern. The cost of garbage disposal is the number two or three item in many community <v Scott Simon>budgets and sometimes their number one problem. <v Allen Hershkowitz>Last year we spent 30 billion dollars getting rid of garbage. <v Allen Hershkowitz>Morgan Stanley, the prestigious Wall Street investment house, predicts that by 1995 <v Allen Hershkowitz>we'll be spending forty five billion dollars. <v Allen Hershkowitz>Getting rid of our garbage. We're closing day care centers. <v Allen Hershkowitz>We're giving teachers early retirement. We can't finance libraries to be open full time. <v Allen Hershkowitz>We're closing firehouses in hospitals and we're spending as a society more and more

<v Allen Hershkowitz>on garbage. <v Scott Simon>Many communities have turned their trash operations over to private industry. <v Scott Simon>As a consequence, garbage has become big business. <v Scott Simon>Companies like Waste Management Inc. <v Scott Simon>and Browning-Ferris Industries have grown huge as they bought out hundreds of smaller <v Scott Simon>community garbage businesses, raising concerns that the industry is becoming <v Scott Simon>too concentrated. <v William Ruckelhaus>There's nothing wrong with consolidation, per say. <v William Ruckelhaus>If it can be done more efficiently, if it causes more efficiencies to come into the <v William Ruckelhaus>system, then where you have literally thousands of local providers <v William Ruckelhaus>of the same service. We, by the way, we continue to compete in many <v William Ruckelhaus>of the areas of the country with small, either very small <v William Ruckelhaus>regional companies or are somewhat broader, broader based on geography <v William Ruckelhaus>in a geographic sense. Regional companies and they're very good. <v William Ruckelhaus>They're very efficient. They're very tough competitors. <v Scott Simon>There is money to be made in garbage.

<v Scott Simon>Industry insiders say the profits at a large landfill before taxes and corporate overhead <v Scott Simon>typically run about 50 percent or more of revenues. <v Scott Simon>It's also a dirty and a difficult way to try to make money requiring lawyers to <v Scott Simon>oversee regulations scientists and sophisticated technology. <v Scott Simon>Show only the large assets of a major company you can afford. <v Scott Simon>It's a risky business, especially when companies assume unknown future liabilities <v Scott Simon>and they buy old municipal dumps. <v Scott Simon>The growing complexity of the industry demands new skills a student can now <v Scott Simon>get a degree in garbage or waste management, as they prefer to call it. <v Scott Simon>The Rochester Institute of Technology offers a bachelors degree program that incorporates <v Scott Simon>the specialized training a waste management professional will need. <v John Morelli>Garbage has become a very complex and sophisticated business, and <v John Morelli>a lot of us in the garbage business wear suits and ties and not overalls. <v John Morelli>So things have changed, yes.

<v Benjamin Napier>You don't have to work with garbage directly. Marketing is a big thing. <v Benjamin Napier>Public relations is a big thing. And now we have environmental law <v Benjamin Napier>to worry about. You need environmental lawyers, unfortunately, but it's <v Benjamin Napier>so it's a wide open field. <v Scott Simon>The term garbage man seems insufficient for so sophisticated a profession. <v Scott Simon>It may help to understand that in early America, garbage and working in garbage <v Scott Simon>had less of a stigma than today. <v Scott Simon>Americans commonly scoured the dumps for material, as illustrated in this 1859 <v Scott Simon>etching by Winslow Homer. <v Scott Simon>Garbage is frequently just tossed into the streets in those early days. <v Scott Simon>And pigs roam freely, cleaning up in their own distinctive way. <v Scott Simon>But for much of our history, the garbage man has been the butt literally of <v Scott Simon>bad jokes. <v Speaker 8>[Crashing and metal clanking] What happened? You're all canned up. [Man yells] <v Scott Simon>[Woman singing jingle] But the garbage crisis accumulated more recently, starting shortly

<v Scott Simon>after World War Two. More and more, two career families had less time <v Scott Simon>for cooking, cleaning and other household chores. <v Scott Simon>Convenience foods arrived in shimmery new packaging. <v Scott Simon>[Orchestral music playing] <v Speaker 9>Complete dinners which only need heating and are ready to serve. <v Scott Simon>The era of plastic forks and paper plates was upon us all to make cooking, eating <v Scott Simon>and cleaning quick and easy. No muss, no fuss. <v Scott Simon>Of course, what we didn't quite realize then was that a lot of this stuff <v Scott Simon>would come back to haunt us, perhaps to no one's surprise. <v Scott Simon>Garbage has now been enshrined in museums. <v Scott Simon>There are at least two in the United States. <v Scott Simon>This is the Great Wall of guard at the recycling rate near San Jose, California, <v Scott Simon>100 feet long, 20 feet high and 1 foot deep. <v Scott Simon>This wall represents the amount of garbage America produces in just

<v Scott Simon>one second. Tattered toys, broken bicycle's old appliances, discarded <v Scott Simon>packaging, even a half eaten pizza, all of it sterilized and preserved, <v Scott Simon>of course, in this creation, the feel of modern art. <v Scott Simon>Youngsters enjoy the sea and learn what is recyclable, what is not a separation. <v Scott Simon>Systems work into our modern recovery facility. <v Scott Simon>But at the same time, a subtle point is being made. <v Scott Simon>That garbage so long shoved out of sight is now part of our lives. <v Scott Simon>It needs to be seen to be believed and to be understood. <v Scott Simon>3,000 miles away, in the midst of New Jersey's Hackensack Meadowlands. <v Scott Simon>A handsome structure rises from the wetlands, which were once the burial grounds <v Scott Simon>for the garbage of 100 communities. <v Scott Simon>It's an environmental center, but it camouflages a museum that acknowledges its garbage <v Scott Simon>legacy. Here you walk into a cavern of trash that seems <v Scott Simon>overwhelming and precarious, set to tip like an avalanche.

<v Scott Simon>Few aspects of the garbage crisis have generated the anger that shipping <v Scott Simon>trash from one state to another does or from one country to another. <v Scott Simon>These trucks are hauling Canadian trash into the United States, while only <v Scott Simon>about 8 percent of our nation's trash is shipped across state borders. <v Scott Simon>Sometimes it seems to produce 90 percent of the ?anger.?Many parts <v Scott Simon>of the Midwest, with its wide open spaces and lower dumping fees, attracts <v Scott Simon>the trash from the populous eastern states. <v Scott Simon>Indiana is one of those garbage destinations. <v Scott Simon>Early each morning, out-of-state trash trailers lined up outside this landfill near Paru, <v Scott Simon>Indiana, to disgorge hundreds of tons of garbage into what was once <v Scott Simon>a local dump. Neighbors feel they and their rural environment are being exploited. <v Jerry Browning>I really kind of bought my paradise out here. And when I bought this land and I worked <v Jerry Browning>hard on it, I mean, my wife, both in the family, of course, but then you got that

<v Jerry Browning>back there, it was just like a thorn in the side because we nearby said that's <v Jerry Browning>a place out by the dump. Not that's a place out there with the nice pond, you know. <v Scott Simon>In Center Point, Indiana, population <v Scott Simon>250. Residents became enraged several years ago when they saw their <v Scott Simon>small local landfill, which used to receive only two trucks a day, <v Scott Simon>suddenly take on 20 to 30 tractor trailer loads each day. <v Scott Simon>The increased traffic meant more accidents, particularly repugnant when 20 tons of <v Scott Simon>garbage is involved. Residents formed the dump patrol and began monitoring <v Scott Simon>every arriving truck, using videotapes and photographs to push for <v Scott Simon>stricter landfill regulation. <v Scott Simon>Only when it neared capacity did the landfill turn away out-of-state trash. <v Scott Simon>But for how long? <v Terri Moore>Center Point landfill is wanting to expand. They currently have pending an additional <v Terri Moore>hundred and twenty foot heigth increase. <v Terri Moore>They already can go 40, the extra hundred twenty would put them 40

<v Terri Moore>feet higher than the town's water tower. <v Terri Moore>Basic3ally underneath the area where you see the dozers now, this area has been deep <v Terri Moore>mined at the turn of the century. <v Terri Moore>New state and federal laws don't allow the site of facilities over this type of <v Terri Moore>geology. If the permit is granted, we'll have to see the state. <v Dan Coats>Of export of waste. <v Scott Simon>Indiana Senator Dan Coats has been a vocal opponent of interstate trash commerce <v Scott Simon>just in his last election campaign, he pulled no punches about whom he was talking. <v Dan Coats>Out-of-state to waste. <v Speaker 10>Good morning. I'm from New Jersey. <v Speaker 10>Here's today's garbage. I'll just dump it right here. <v Speaker 11>Sound crazy? That's what states like New Jersey do to us every day. <v Speaker 10>Have a beautiful day. <v Speaker 11>Senator Dan Coats says stop. <v Dan Coats>Their garbage, costs us money, pollutes our land and water, and we barely have enough <v Dan Coats>space for our own garbage. But Washington won't let us keep it out. <v Speaker 11>The Dan Coats Bill, give Indiana the right to slam the door on out-of-state garbage.

<v Dan Coats>If other states solve their problem, not by responsibly building new landfills <v Dan Coats>or dealing with their trash situation, but just simply putting it at a truck or a train, <v Dan Coats>sending it west to the first state, they can dump it in and then tipping it over in the <v Dan Coats>middle of the night or the first thing in the morning. <v Dan Coats>We cannot allow that. That's not the way to solve our waste disposal problem <v Dan Coats>in the United States. <v Frank Lautenberg>The reason that New Jersey is forced to export a lot of its material <v Frank Lautenberg>is because we used to import it and we didn't always like the position of the importer. <v Frank Lautenberg>We, as a matter of fact, had quite a fight with our neighbor to the west, <v Frank Lautenberg>Pennsylvania, and took it to the Supreme Court in order to try and stop the shipment <v Frank Lautenberg>of their municipal waste to our state. <v Frank Lautenberg>We were not successful. The court upheld the constitutionality <v Frank Lautenberg>of free access through transportation, state <v Frank Lautenberg>to state, and that interstate commerce governance and it ought to continue <v Frank Lautenberg>to govern.

<v Evan Bayh>Several of the states have not planned adequately and now find themselves in this <v Evan Bayh>dilemma. So. Right, listening to the suffering of people in our state, very hard for me <v Evan Bayh>to have a whole lot of sympathy for those in other states who say, well, we just can't <v Evan Bayh>help ourselves. We have to keep dumping on you, it's just not right. <v Scott Simon>As trash wars threaten to break out between the states. <v Scott Simon>Congress has been trying to rewrite the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. <v Scott Simon>That's a mouthful better known as rick-route. <v Scott Simon>It's a complex law that would regulate regular garbage, hazardous waste and <v Scott Simon>recycling. But it's provoked scores of special interests and has been controversial. <v Scott Simon>Thus, for a second session in a row, Congress put off action for the future. <v Max Baucus>I'm only slightly disappointed. <v Max Baucus>I'm not too disappointed because it's not the most glamorous issue around. <v Max Baucus>People talk about garbage around here. <v Max Baucus>The eyes kind of glaze over much rather talk about defense budgets or <v Max Baucus>or AIDS or or health care reform. <v Max Baucus>You know, those those are the big, sexy, glamorous issues around here. <v Max Baucus>The garbage just doesn't quite pack it compared with those.

<v Max Baucus>But on the other hand, I think we we put a dent into the consciousness <v Max Baucus>of those who are charged with first responsibility of this issue. <v Scott Simon>This is not the first time the United States government has become deeply interested in <v Scott Simon>its garbage during World War 2. <v Scott Simon>Four Army Privates Horace Schwerin, ?Faelin? <v Scott Simon>Golden, Robert Burkin and Horace Hetzel were asked by Army officials <v Scott Simon>to conduct a study on what soldiers didn't like about military food, that <v Scott Simon>is aside from its taste. <v Scott Simon>Mr. Schwerin was a market researcher in civilian life, and he put together a group of <v Scott Simon>volunteers to observe the men eating in the mess halls. <v Scott Simon>They recorded what the Soldiers ate, didn't eat and threw away. <v Scott Simon>After studying 2.4 Million meals, the privates reported that at <v Scott Simon>least 20 percent of the food was being wasted. <v Scott Simon>They found that most men disliked soups, detested kale and spinach. <v Scott Simon>Eat more if they didn't have to wait in line and eat still more if they were allowed to <v Scott Simon>smoke in the mess hall. The Army implemented their recommendations, which saved 2

<v Scott Simon>and a half million pounds a day. The 4 privates, were promoted. <v Scott Simon>They had saved taxpayers 110 million wartime dollars a year. <v Scott Simon>But modern day garbage has never before received the kind of scrutiny it's had from <v Scott Simon>Dr. Bill Rathje at the University of Arizona since 1973, <v Scott Simon>when he organized the garbage project. <v Scott Simon>Dr. Rathje was an archeologist, has opened America's landfills <v Scott Simon>and found them to be airtight tombs commemorating our material world. <v Bill Rathje>Most people believe that garbage biodegrades once it gets <v Bill Rathje>buried in the landfill, goes back to the bosom of Mother Nature. <v Bill Rathje>And what we found by digging into 15 landfills across North America is. <v Bill Rathje>That just doesn't happen in most well-run landfills. <v Bill Rathje>Biodegradation is either very slow for food, <v Bill Rathje>waste and yard waste or virtually nonexistent.

<v Bill Rathje>And the end result is after 20 years, we have corn on the cob. <v Bill Rathje>We have a head of lettuce. We have newspapers galore. <v Scott Simon>Dr. Rathje and his students have sorted through tons of garbage from landfills all around <v Scott Simon>the country. Their work, now known as garbology, has already <v Scott Simon>trash some garbage bins. <v Bill Rathje>I think that most people that that I've talked to informally and that we've interviewed <v Bill Rathje>his groups believe that the major culprits for filling up landfills <v Bill Rathje>are Styrofoam, fast food packaging and disposable diapers. <v Bill Rathje>And if you add their estimates up and it's anywhere from 75 to <v Bill Rathje>125 percent of what's in here is those three items. <v Bill Rathje>Well, obviously, it's got to be wrong. <v Bill Rathje>And it is. When you dig this stuff up and when you weigh it and measure it for volume, <v Bill Rathje>Styrofoam is about 0.8 percent. <v Bill Rathje>In other words, less than 1 percent of what's in here.

<v Bill Rathje>Fast food for packaging is less than half of 1 percent of what's <v Bill Rathje>in here. Diapers, anywhere between point eight and one <v Bill Rathje>point two percent. So altogether, it's less than three percent <v Bill Rathje>of what's holding us up today. <v Scott Simon>Dr. Rathje's found that paper actually takes up more space, nearly 50 percent <v Scott Simon>of today's average landfill yard, food scraps and wood take up 13 <v Scott Simon>percent plastics such as milk and soda containers food packaging, polystyrene <v Scott Simon>foam take a 10 percent. <v Scott Simon>Metal items comprise about six percent glass, except up just 1 percent. <v Scott Simon>Miscellaneous construction, debris, tires and textiles take up 20 percent. <v Bill Rathje>Well, I think that future archeologists will look back upon <v Bill Rathje>me as probably the luckiest archeologist in the history of the world, <v Bill Rathje>because I've got so much data. <v Bill Rathje>I mean, it's everywhere and it's so beautifully preserved. <v Bill Rathje>And you can read everything and you can you know, it's just it's just wonderful.

<v Bill Rathje>In terms of future generations, I think archeologists will still call us a golden age <v Bill Rathje>and wonderful. But I think if you look at it from a resource management perspective, <v Bill Rathje>we're gonna be seen as incredibly wasteful. <v Bill Rathje>And we have created so many of these monuments to our conspicuous <v Bill Rathje>consumption, the landfills. <v Scott Simon>Few of us give much thought to just how much trash our family's make in a day, <v Scott Simon>much less a year. So we decided to explore just that with the Lentino family <v Scott Simon>who lived near Baltimore with their three children, they permitted us to set up a camera <v Scott Simon>near the kitchen, garbage can in which they agreed to place all of their trash for <v Scott Simon>a single day. <v Scott Simon>First, Mr. and Mrs. Lentino, let me thank you for doing this.

<v Scott Simon>I can't think of many other families who would do this. I can't think of a family would <v Scott Simon>want to do this. Now, this is this is one day's trash that we've saved. <v Scott Simon>Now, do you mind if we go through this? <v Scott Simon>Sure. [Laughs] This is you recognize this, right? <v Scott Simon>You're probably the ones that don't. First off, he's not with us right now. <v Scott Simon>But either you have a dog or some recipe tips we probably don't want to hear. <v Scott Simon>Let's see. This is, uh, these are taco shells, a box, taco shells. <v Scott Simon>You people like Mexican food? <v Scott Simon>Yeah. Something you brought in from the outside. <v Scott Simon>Yes. One of those one of those plastic sandwich containers this will outlive all of us <v Scott Simon>won't us? <v Mrs. Lentino>Salad. <v Scott Simon>Salad, Ok. <v Scott Simon>Styrofoam looks like it contained meat. <v Scott Simon>Some paper plates. <v Scott Simon>Bill, let me ask let me ask you. <v Scott Simon>We've got a we've got a glass bottle that held apple juice, I guess, <v Scott Simon>and we have a plastic container that held skim milk. <v Scott Simon>Now, both the glass bottle and the skim milk container, they're sort of things that can <v Scott Simon>be recycled.

<v Mr. Lentino>Right. <v Scott Simon>Do you do that? <v Mr. Lentino>A little bit, I'm starting to. <v Scott Simon>With your with your permission, we'd like to show you exactly how much trash <v Scott Simon>a family of five can produce in a year. <v Mr. Lentino>OK. <v Speaker 12>[Laughs] I can smell it from here. I hope this isn't too old. <v Scott Simon>Danielle, look at the mess you've made. [Laughs] [Machine noises]This <v Scott Simon>is three and a half tons of garbage.

<v Scott Simon>Danielle, your reaction please. [Laughs] <v Scott Simon>Does this make you feel any differently about recylcing? <v Mrs. Lentino>Yeah, my stomach is really turning over right here, really makes <v Mrs. Lentino>me take stock of everything I throw away. <v Mrs. Lentino>I'm into convenience quick and easy, get rid of the trash. <v Mrs. Lentino>But obviously, it's not that quick and it's not that easy. <v Scott Simon>If you were wondering. Yes, we did clean up this epic clutter. <v Scott Simon>Well, actually, it was the highly trained sanitation professionals who did. <v Scott Simon>By the way, it cost the county about $150 to bury the Latino's <v Scott Simon>family trash in the local landfill this year. <v Scott Simon>Now, the concept of a landfill sounds simple. You dig a huge hole, you dump in the <v Scott Simon>garbage. Then you cover that. <v Scott Simon>A modern landfill is actually a very sophisticated work of engineering. <v Scott Simon>This model illustrates the many features that are beneath the surface.

<v Scott Simon>In this design, the bottom is lined with a layer of high density polyethylene plastic. <v Scott Simon>It's then covered with compacted clay. <v Scott Simon>Then another layer of plastic running. <v Scott Simon>Between and above those liners is a series of perforated pipe that's designed to collect <v Scott Simon>the leachate. That's the water that's filtered down through the garbage, which is then <v Scott Simon>pumped up to a treatment facility. <v Scott Simon>Wells are drilled around the perimeter of the landfill to monitor any contamination of <v Scott Simon>local groundwater. <v Scott Simon>After each day's garbage is unloaded, compressed and pushed into which place? <v Scott Simon>It's then covered with dirt to reduce odors and deter animals. <v Scott Simon>Pipes are sunk into the trash cells, as they're called, to collect methane gas from the <v Scott Simon>decomposing garbage. The gas is sometimes flared off but many landfills <v Scott Simon>burn it to generate electricity. <v Scott Simon>When the landfill is full and impermeable, clay cap is used to seal the facility <v Scott Simon>and a drainage ditch carries away rainwater. <v Scott Simon>The new land created can then be used in many ways. <v Scott Simon>This golf course in Illinois, for example, is built over a former landfill

<v Scott Simon>and still has an operating landfill beside it. <v Scott Simon>That'll certainly discourage slices. <v Scott Simon>Just outside of Detroit, a former landfill is home to a greenhouse operation where <v Scott Simon>gorment may lettuce grown not in the soil, of course, but hydroponically with <v Scott Simon>nutrient rich water feeding the plants through their roots. <v Scott Simon>The greenhouse does use the landfill produced methane gas to heat the facility. <v Jim Quinn>The reaction usually starts with kind of a smile and <v Jim Quinn>often generates and almost kind of a snicker to some laughter. <v Jim Quinn>They usually think it's great. I mean, it's it's just a positive use of landfill <v Jim Quinn>gas and also the use of the land from the landfill. <v Jim Quinn>Some of the restaurants will service with a complete product line and a good example of <v Jim Quinn>that is the National Press Club. <v Curtis Eargle>I like to tell people that, you know, especially when they have a mouthful of lettuce, I <v Curtis Eargle>say, well, you know, it's grown over garbage. Most of them stop and mid mid bite you know <v Curtis Eargle>for a second you know? Until I until I tell them that.

<v Curtis Eargle>You know, I explain the whole process of how it's grown and how it's sealed. <v Curtis Eargle>And then most people, I think, are happy to hear that land that used to be a landfill or <v Curtis Eargle>whatever is recycled and used for a proper commercial venture now. <v Curtis Eargle>Of course, little of this makes landfills popular neighbors for a town or city. <v Curtis Eargle>But in Riverview, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, the attitude may be different. <v Peter Rotteveel>Garbage ?made the city Riverview,? Believe it or not. <v Scott Simon>Riverview has found it unusual and highly creative way <v Scott Simon>of dealing with its garbage in that of neighboring towns. <v Speaker 13>[Pop jingle playing] Make this your year to feel the thrill. <v Scott Simon>The town is sculpted a mountain of garbage into a ski slope with two chairlifts, <v Scott Simon>a ski lodge, two golf courses and two adjacent housing developments, one <v Scott Simon>with four to five hundred thousand dollar homes. <v Scott Simon>What's it like to live next to a resort that's known by some residents as Mount <v Scott Simon>Trashmore?

<v Speaker 14>Oh, I think it's wonderful. I can't wait until the expansion goes up. <v Speaker 14>And I hope they have a great. They're planning a restaurant up there. <v Speaker 15>A new clubhouse or restaurant or something which will be nice. <v Speaker 16>Right, right, right. And we gold so and we love the golf. <v Speaker 16>In the summer and in the winter, if we wanted to have dinner at the restaurant, let the <v Speaker 16>kids ski. I mean, it's it's it's just great. <v Scott Simon>Riverview's imaginative concept was slightly tarnished when an environmental group sued <v Scott Simon>the town for not adequately treating the landfill leaching. <v Scott Simon>Despite garbage based ski resorts and golf courses, trash is still mostly unpopular. <v Scott Simon>There's that reaction known as NIMBY, not in my backyard. <v Scott Simon>Where the root of the garbage crisis may be. <v Speaker 2>Come on, folks, let's close the landfill and let's have alternatives. <v Speaker 2>There are six alternatives out there, and this one's still in Laurel. <v Speaker 2>Frankie'd be mad at me, but tough tamales. ?Canterra? <v Speaker 2>is still available. Dump it there. <v Speaker 2>Let him have it. We've been dumped on enough in this part of the county. <v Speaker 2>Share the burden. <v Speaker 2>Share the burden.

<v Scott Simon>When her neighbors in Nashville learned that Tanya Tucker had sold an option on property <v Scott Simon>for a landfill, they sang a ballad of anger and disappointment. <v Speaker 17>I look at Tanya as somebody that's made it in the country music business and she owes a <v Speaker 17>lot to her fans. <v Speaker 17>And this is the way she repays us. <v Scott Simon>The landfill developer later backed down to the homeowners opposition <v Scott Simon>in the small village of bliss in western New York, where ski slopes already abound, <v Scott Simon>residents of this economically depressed town invited BFI Browning-Ferris <v Scott Simon>Industries, the second largest garbage company, to explain what a landfill would mean <v Scott Simon>for their economy. It was an anxious step for the small community. <v Speaker 18>[People speaking over each other] People saying they don't want it and you know. <v Speaker 19>And they don't live here. <v Speaker 18>And they don't live here. <v Speaker 19>[Man speaking over speaker] You know what I think is really sad? You know what I think is really <v Speaker 19>sad? <v Speaker 19>The poor person is the one ?inaudible? The poor person. If you listen to that tape- Excuse me. Excuse me. <v Speaker 20>I don't like ?that answer? <v Speaker 19>Excuse me if you listen to that tape <v Scott Simon>The town voted on the landfill and the residents were almost exactly split. <v Speaker 21>I don't see where it's going to hurt. It's gotta go somewhere.

<v Speaker 21>Right now, we're paying to send it God knows where you know? <v Speaker 21>Who knows where it's going? And I myself, I'm all for it. <v Speaker 21>I have been done from the start. <v Speaker 22>This is a nice place to live and I would like to see it stay that way. <v Speaker 22>I can't solve the world's garbage, but I'd like to keep. <v Speaker 22>I'm willing to house my own garbage, but not everybody else's. <v Scott Simon>The proposition lost by a dozen votes. <v Scott Simon>But the potential loss of jobs and income led to a second referendum organized by <v Scott Simon>landfill supporters, but boycotted by opponents. <v Scott Simon>This time the landfill won. The company accepted the vote as legitimate <v Scott Simon>and is now prospecting for a site. <v Scott Simon>While landfills currently accept two thirds of our garbage, about 16 percent <v Scott Simon>is incinerated. That figure is growing. <v Scott Simon>Modern incinerators burn trash at very high temperatures, about 2000 degrees <v Scott Simon>Fahrenheit. This destroys all biological microbes and produces only a <v Scott Simon>little smoke, which is filtered away. <v Scott Simon>Here's a modern mass burn system.

<v Scott Simon>Trash is dumped into a large hopper where it's lifted by a crane and fed into <v Scott Simon>a furnace. In the furnace, a series of moving grates facilitates the burning <v Scott Simon>while allowing ash and noncombustibles such as metal and glass to fall into a vat <v Scott Simon>for later removal. Heat from the furnace turns water into steam, which <v Scott Simon>drives a generator and produces electricity. <v Scott Simon>In the meantime, the smoke from the furnace is cleaned by passing through an <v Scott Simon>electrostatic precipitators or a gas grabber and possibly a bag house, which <v Scott Simon>is a series of bag filters. <v Scott Simon>Nothing appears to come out of the stack at a waste to energy facilities the industry <v Scott Simon>prefers to call them. However, minute amounts of toxins such as dioxins, <v Scott Simon>forams and heavy metals do come out of the stacks of mass burn incinerators. <v Scott Simon>Many environmentalists believe even these small amounts are dangerous. <v Scott Simon>In the spring of 1992, these environmentalist chained themselves to the gates <v Scott Simon>of a garbage burning plant in Florida to protest what they claim are high emissions <v Scott Simon>of mercury now being found in the Everglades.

<v Speaker 23>We're basically tired of watching the Glades choke to <v Speaker 23>death and they are choking to death and the mercury emissions. <v Speaker 24>We tried working through the legislature. <v Speaker 24>We tried appealing to our different industries. <v Speaker 24>Nothing works. And basically, we're gonna do whatever it takes. <v Scott Simon>But industry claims that such charges are exaggerated. <v Scott Simon>These plants meet every government standard and pose no threat. <v Kent Burton>That these facilities, particularly when considered in the context of a risk <v Kent Burton>assessment, are very, very safe. <v Kent Burton>Indeed, when you compare living next to a facility with virtually any <v Kent Burton>other human activity, including flying to Denver on an airplane <v Kent Burton>or driving to work in the morning, it's safer to live to live next <v Kent Burton>to one of these facilities than than participate in many other areas of human <v Kent Burton>activity. <v Paul Connett>Risk assessment is very problematic. <v Paul Connett>It's a theoretical exercise. I see it as a pseudo scientific exercise, <v Paul Connett>a justification, rationalization for a political decision that has already been made.

<v Paul Connett>You want to build an incinerator calling the experts, pay them an enormous amount of <v Paul Connett>money to prove that it's safe. <v Scott Simon>The construction of mass burn incineration plants has slowed in recent years as <v Scott Simon>communities balked at the enormous costs of such facilities, much as several hundred <v Scott Simon>million dollars each, often double that when bond interest payments are included. <v Scott Simon>And it raises the question of whether communities can successfully integrate <v Scott Simon>recycling programs alongside a seemingly insatiable incinerator. <v Kent Burton>The number one recycling community in the United States in 1991 <v Kent Burton>was Newark, New Jersey. They were recognized as such by the EPA. <v Kent Burton>They were recycling 52 percent of their waste and that in the shadows <v Kent Burton>of the 2,250 ton per day waste to energy plant. <v Paul Connett>Newark is a very embarrassing example for the incinerator industry, to, to put <v Paul Connett>forward, because in fact, in Newark they are importing waste from other counties <v Paul Connett>because they did the recycling.

<v Paul Connett>There wasn't enough trash in the county which they were built the incinerator for. <v Paul Connett>And so now they're having to import waste from Bergen County and other counties. <v Paul Connett>Integrated waste management is rather like putting a tiger and a lamb in bed together <v Paul Connett>and expecting tiglets when in fact you get is a bloody pieces <v Paul Connett>of lamb that the tiger devours the lamb. <v Paul Connett>The incinerator devours any really significant effort to <v Paul Connett>recycle and compost and reduce waste. <v Paul Connett>They need to maximize the use of an incinerator. <v Scott Simon>When recycling began to take off with the first Earth Day in 1970, it was <v Scott Simon>perceived as somewhat fadish, but it was not the first time the United States has <v Scott Simon>attempted large scale recycling. <v Scott Simon>In World War Two, scrap drives were organized tires for rubber, metal for ships <v Scott Simon>and planes, even kitchen grease to be used in explosives. <v Scott Simon>Today, recycling, again, seems to be one practical thing a citizen

<v Scott Simon>can personally do about a momentous crisis. <v Scott Simon>Curbside programs are now common around the country though hundreds of volunteer efforts <v Scott Simon>have made recycling a part of American life in the 1990s. <v Scott Simon>[Hip hop song playing] <v Scott Simon>We have an accumulation of new products here that show some of the creative uses of

<v Scott Simon>recycled products. Now this marina deck and this picnic table, for example, <v Scott Simon>are made out of planks that have been made out of old milk jugs and soda bottles and a <v Scott Simon>variety of other plastics. My shoes are sort of Earth Jordans, they're made <v Scott Simon>out of recycled cotton canvas. And some of the rubber in these shoes even comes from old <v Scott Simon>divers wetsuits the rug that I'm standing on that's made out of recycled <v Scott Simon>pop bottles. This jacket that I'm wearing outside and in is also <v Scott Simon>made out of recycled pop bottles. <v Scott Simon>This softball is recyclable after it gets off from all the batting and the throwing, <v Scott Simon>you can send it back to the manufacturer and they'll use this old softened up soft to <v Scott Simon>manufacture new softballs. The U.S. <v Scott Simon>military is now buying about a quarter of a million of these softballs each and every <v Scott Simon>year. Let's look closer at the lumber in that deck. <v Scott Simon>It's a good example of turning trash into cash. <v Scott Simon>Well, a number of manufacturers make this product. If you combine all plastic types, 1 <v Scott Simon>through 7. You know, those little codes at the bottom of a plastic container into their

<v Scott Simon>boards like this company in Denton, Maryland. <v Scott Simon>The plastic lumber is impervious to decay. <v Scott Simon>It needs no maintenance. And it lasts, as owner Tom Hitchen says. <v Tom Hitchen>Now we're no longer than stone. <v Scott Simon>The creation of recycled products that people want to buy represents the best way to <v Scott Simon>close the loop is what those arrows in the recycled ?inaudible? <v Scott Simon>Recycled products business is a particularly tough area, and Bill Coon's company in <v Scott Simon>Speckhard, Missouri, has learned that a marketable product is the only way to survive. <v Bill Coon>We bring in our milk jugs. <v Bill Coon>They're baled. We'll grind it, wash it and dry it. <v Bill Coon>And we'll turn it into turn it into sheet goods. <v Bill Coon>Everything from a few thousand's thick, up to 5/8 of an inch in thickness. <v Bill Coon>Our rotational system we make many different items with that. <v Bill Coon>You know, anything from the egg industry is, as feeder's is concerned, <v Bill Coon>to items such as seats for

<v Bill Coon>ultralight aircraft or battery boxes. <v Bill Coon>The markets analysts. <v Bill Coon>It's all to be done. Then there's a home for all this plastic. <v Scott Simon>Construction debris, as we saw earlier, floods many municipal landfills. <v Scott Simon>It doesn't have to be that way as the nonprofit organization, The Loading Dock in <v Scott Simon>Baltimore, Maryland, demonstrates his group accepts castoff building materials <v Scott Simon>from construction companies, manufacturers and even collects materials at area landfills. <v Scott Simon>Materials are sold to nonprofit low income housing groups like Habitat for Humanity. <v Hope Cucina>Answering the environmental crisis at the same time as answering low income housing <v Hope Cucina>is just an incredible win win situation. <v Hope Cucina>There's no way there's nothing negative about it. <v Hope Cucina>One person's trash is another person's treasure. <v Hope Cucina>And it's it's it's it's circular.

<v Hope Cucina>And what the loading dock is doing is is helping to close that gap between the circle. <v Scott Simon>Another growing garbage industry is the MRF, the Materials Recovery Facility. <v Scott Simon>Joe Garbarino has one of the more successful operations in the country. <v Scott Simon>Handed down, in fact, from his grandfather, uncles and father. <v Scott Simon>The recycled goods from garbage long before it was a trend. <v Joe Garbarino>We weren't garbage men or rubbish men in San Francisco. <v Joe Garbarino>We were known as scavengers because we scavenged for the garbage to make that extra <v Joe Garbarino>dollar, a little extra paycheck at the end of the month. <v Joe Garbarino>So we started what we now call recycling scavenging <v Joe Garbarino>in the truck. We'd go house to house, pick up those bundles, put them on our back, pack <v Joe Garbarino>them into the truck, and then sort of in each week, we took different turns sorting the <v Joe Garbarino>waste in the truck. Very successful system. <v Scott Simon>His MRF official that he recycles what would usually be left behind. <v Scott Simon>He crushes construction rubble, for example, to use his matrix in new cement. <v Scott Simon>He grinds up wood and tree waste to fuel a power plant.

<v Scott Simon>Joe Garbarino seems to find a use for every seemingly useless thing. <v Scott Simon>When the Boboli pizza dough company began dumping four tons of old dough in cheese in <v Scott Simon>the local landfill each week. He went out and bought 100 pigs and goats. <v Scott Simon>And now he throws the biggest Pirker pizza party in San Francisco every day. <v Scott Simon>A century after their appearance on the streets of America, this mischievous menagerie <v Scott Simon>has resumed. At least a small role in the garbage crisis. <v Scott Simon>Paper, which is the largest component of our waste stream, has found a home with this <v Scott Simon>company in Baltimore. For nearly 100 years, it's been turning waste paper into <v Scott Simon>cardboard for candy boxes, gift boxes and packing cartons long <v Scott Simon>before recycling was even a word. <v Scott Simon>Turning old newspapers into recycled newsprint is a much more involved and <v Scott Simon>expensive process. Currently, there are about nine debunking plants in the <v Scott Simon>country, with the surge in newspaper collection for recycling in states requiring <v Scott Simon>publishers to use some recycled content in their editions.

<v Scott Simon>A number of new de-inking plants are being built that their enormous costs <v Scott Simon>may mean that the capacity to process old newspapers may lag years <v Scott Simon>behind the supply. <v Scott Simon>Not surprisingly, one of America's top exports is waste paper and cardboard <v Scott Simon>sold to the Far East and this appalls one expert. <v Neil Seldman>The level of those shipments is an indication of how quickly we are becoming <v Neil Seldman>a third world economy. A third world economy has unskilled labor, <v Neil Seldman>has raw material resources and no capital. <v Neil Seldman>And as a result, it uses its labor and its natural resources to ship them <v Neil Seldman>overseas at very low cost and then buys back the finished <v Neil Seldman>product at very high cost. That's exactly what the United States is becoming. <v Scott Simon>Mr. Seldman maintains that there is enormous economic opportunity in garbage for <v Scott Simon>our country and especially our inner cities, just waiting to be exploited. <v Neil Seldman>Recycling now creates a cavalcade of jobs.

<v Neil Seldman>Entry level to be sure, the people who sweep the factory floor and <v Neil Seldman>pick up things and move them around. <v Neil Seldman>But at the same time, it creates jobs for engineers, for manufacturing skills, <v Neil Seldman>for management, for distribution, for bookkeeping, for trucking. <v Neil Seldman>As I say, a whole cavalcade of jobs feeding off of each other. <v Neil Seldman>That is why recycling is critical for the revitalization of our inner cities. <v Neil Seldman>There is no other industry in the country that can bring so many <v Neil Seldman>jobs into every city in the country. <v Scott Simon>But recycling or actually the collection of recyclables has been almost too <v Scott Simon>successful too soon. <v Scott Simon>Many communities began programs before there was a market for recyclable refuse. <v Scott Simon>So today there are warehouses full of newspapers in New Jersey, a mountain of <v Scott Simon>glass in Seattle and piles of plastic in many places around the country. <v Marc Sulam>It's still significantly cheaper to put this material today into a landfill <v Marc Sulam>than it is to recycle many of these types of materials.

<v Marc Sulam>I'm not convinced we do as much recycling as we do more source separation of <v Marc Sulam>the materials. True recycling is to separate materials, have it be reused, <v Marc Sulam>and then go back out buy the materials again. <v Marc Sulam>People say that they're willing to pay the incremental 5 percent, but when push comes to <v Marc Sulam>shove, less people are willing to spend that incremental <v Marc Sulam>amount of money when it comes to spending money. <v Scott Simon>We don't want to leave recycling without looking at one of its more distinctive forms. <v Scott Simon>Garbage as art. Well, one San Francisco artist creates collages <v Scott Simon>from the flotsam and refuse of his own life. <v Ted Van Cleave>I think art's a good medium to convey conservation. <v Ted Van Cleave>And with this particular piece here, I put on some objects which <v Ted Van Cleave>had a lot of meaning to me out of personal meaning. This is a part my mother gave me when <v Ted Van Cleave>I left home about 20 years ago. And this is a fishing lure I inherited from my <v Ted Van Cleave>grandfather and my softball pants here. <v Ted Van Cleave>And with that, I added some household debris.

<v Ted Van Cleave>We have an old calculator that broke old Byron bottle and other things. <v Ted Van Cleave>I do traditional work, but I chose this because we started recycling in San Francisco <v Ted Van Cleave>about four years ago, and it really brought to mind to me how much recycling <v Ted Van Cleave>can save. And I thought that was a message that needed to get out. <v Ted Van Cleave>And so I can convey that with my art. <v Scott Simon>The work of Mierle Ukeles has fascinated New York City for more than a decade, where <v Scott Simon>she's been the official artist in residence at the Department of Sanitation for <v Scott Simon>artistic object is simple to persuade society that the garbage crisis <v Scott Simon>will end only when people learn to view garbage in a new way. <v Mierle Ukeles>When people say I'm finished with this object, <v Mierle Ukeles>when they call it garbage, it means they're stripping the meaning of value <v Mierle Ukeles>out of the material. We have to do radical shifting of our whole <v Mierle Ukeles>way of thinking. Artists play a role in in creating <v Mierle Ukeles>possibilities for people to sort of like open up their

<v Mierle Ukeles>brains. We've all got to become artists. <v Scott Simon>We've seen our past philosophy on garbage has been to bury it. <v Scott Simon>And if you run out of room to burn it. <v Scott Simon>Many argue that our strategy for the future should be to reduce the waste first, <v Scott Simon>recycle what we can, burn only what we should, and then bury <v Scott Simon>what we must. But what goes into each category? <v Scott Simon>Reducing the sheer amount of garbage certainly makes sense. <v Scott Simon>Take product packaging, for example, which comprises about a third of our waste. <v Scott Simon>Manufacturers have been spurred into action by consumers. <v Speaker 25>These days, the less trash, the better. <v Speaker 25>Right, Cathy? <v Speaker 26>Yeah. <v Speaker 25>That's one reason we love the downy refill. <v Speaker 25>It's a snap. I just poured into my empty bottle. <v Speaker 25>Add water. <v Speaker 26>Let me do it. <v Speaker 25>And that's all we throw away. <v Speaker 25>And I still get the fluffiest softness.

<v Speaker 27>The Downy Refill, more softness, less trash. <v Speaker 26>Every little bit helps. <v Tom Rattray>It was a runaway success. <v Tom Rattray>It took us, frankly, by surprise a lot of people. <v Tom Rattray>This is big in Europe, much more environmentally oriented. <v Scott Simon>Why would you be surprised by this? <v Tom Rattray>Because of the American consumers reluctance to change habits. <v Tom Rattray>We have never seen so broad or rapid a change in consumer <v Tom Rattray>values and tastes as in the environmental area. <v Scott Simon>Now, a growing number of reduced and recycled packaged products are coming onto the <v Scott Simon>market as companies are actually competing to be green. <v Scott Simon>But some experts feel that since manufacturers create much of that waste problem by <v Scott Simon>over packaging for sales appeal. <v Scott Simon>That companies should be required to take back some of those throwaway containers <v Scott Simon>and wrappers and recycle. <v Allen Hershkowitz>They have to manage the hazardous wastes. <v Allen Hershkowitz>They have to manage their waterways. They have to manage their air emissions. <v Allen Hershkowitz>Why don't they have to manage these wastes as well?

<v Scott Simon>There is one American company that is clearly more devoted than most to reducing <v Scott Simon>its own clutter. That's McDonald's. <v Scott Simon>The company approached the Environmental Defense Fund and asked for their advice. <v Scott Simon>Together, they created a task force which came up with more than 40 ways to reduce <v Scott Simon>waste at its 8500 restaurants. <v Scott Simon>The company eliminated its polystyrene hamburger container, which had become a symbol for <v Scott Simon>many. Environmentalists have senseless packaging favorite paper wrappers. <v Scott Simon>It eliminated syrup containers by installing stainless steel tanks and having tank trucks <v Scott Simon>delivered the syrup. Roof shingles at new restaurants are now made of recycled computer <v Scott Simon>cases. Rubber play surfaces are developed from old tires and tables. <v Scott Simon>Benches and chairs are also recycled plastic. <v Robert L. Langert>18 million people a day go to McDonald's in the United States. <v Robert L. Langert>They care about the environment. McDonald's cares about the environment. <v Robert L. Langert>It's good business to have solid environmental practices. <v Robert L. Langert>So I think the trends there and I think the trend is more and more towards

<v Robert L. Langert>what McDonald's is doing towards sound practical programs <v Robert L. Langert>that make sense for their business. <v Scott Simon>Finally, there is one unusual strategy in the garbage crisis that we must take a look at. <v Scott Simon>Solid waste composting now. <v Scott Simon>Composting, of course, is the controlled decaying of organic materials into fertilizer <v Scott Simon>for soil. It's a process that gardeners have used for centuries. <v Scott Simon>But this company in Florida uses garbage as its source for organics and it <v Scott Simon>processes 600 tons of trash a day, carefully separating the <v Scott Simon>inorganic from the organic employees sought out hazardous materials in <v Scott Simon>the garbage. As it arrives, machines rip open garbage bags, remove <v Scott Simon>plastics, metals and glass and still more workers remove valuable recyclables. <v Scott Simon>It's an expensive and involved process, but critical. <v Scott Simon>If the compost product is to be pure enough to play some Florida food crops, where <v Scott Simon>it's now being tested. <v Joe Blankenship>We b- view the market in South Florida as being a very

<v Joe Blankenship>substantial one. <v Joe Blankenship>This truly is a recycling of the garbage is <v Joe Blankenship>a beneficial product. <v Scott Simon>But environmentalists are uncomfortable about using municipal solid waste for compost. <v Richard Denison>Putting materials that could be recycled into a campus facility <v Richard Denison>sacrifices the real value of those materials. <v Richard Denison>Instead of being using paper to make paper again, using paper <v Richard Denison>to make a very low grade soil amendment is a waste of the <v Richard Denison>resources that went into that paper in the first place. <v Scott Simon>Regardless of the strategies we choose, there is one aspect of the garbage crisis <v Scott Simon>that's becoming quite apparent. <v Scott Simon>Our trash is going to cost us more money. <v Scott Simon>Seattle, Washington. Faced with a garbage crisis in the mid 1980s, try to garbage <v Scott Simon>experiment that was watched by the nation. <v Scott Simon>He devised a system in which the residents garbage bills were tied to the volume <v Scott Simon>of waste they created.

<v Ray Hoffman>The more garbage you put out the more you pay. <v Ray Hoffman>And if you put out a lot, you pay a whole lot of money. <v Ray Hoffman>And the result has been that around 90 percent of the city's single family population <v Ray Hoffman>puts out 30 gallons of trash or less a week, which is unprecedented in this <v Ray Hoffman>country. <v Scott Simon>Seattle citizens now purchase different sized waste pales, the larger the can the greater <v Scott Simon>the fee. Free curbside recycling encourages residents to short bottles, <v Scott Simon>paper and other trash to reduce the cost of their garbage. <v Scott Simon>The concept takes a step further in Farmington, Minnesota. <v Scott Simon>It's something nicknamed garbage by the pound. <v Scott Simon>Here, one's garbage bill is calculated by its weight. <v Scott Simon>Much like any other utility. <v Robert Williamson>This is the way the real world is. I mean, you go to the gas station and you pay for a <v Robert Williamson>gallon. You go to the meat market and you pay per pound. <v Robert Williamson>Turn on your electric light. You're paying about a kilowatt hour. <v Robert Williamson>So why not garbage by the pound? <v Scott Simon>This is high tech trash. <v Scott Simon>An onboard computer receives a radio signal from a garbage can transponder identifies

<v Scott Simon>its owner, weighs it up and bills the household. <v Scott Simon>But maybe the eventual solution to the garbage crisis is right in front of us. <v Scott Simon>Children who have grown up with reducing and recycling trash has been natural <v Scott Simon>and necessary. There is an eagerness among them to learn the ABC's <v Scott Simon>of waste. It can even be fun. <v Scott Simon>[Sesame Street song playing] You guys do a lot of recycling

<v Scott Simon>in this school? <v Speaker 28>We recycle paper, we recycle. <v Speaker 29>Cans. <v Speaker 28>stuff in the, yeah we recycle soda cans. We recycle lunch trays, the sporks. <v Speaker 30>We take the stacks of newspaper and as you see the truck come by in <v Speaker 30>the morning, they usually have different sections to throw in the glass and <v Speaker 30>the newspapers in different places so it's mostly already sorted. <v Scott Simon>Now, do you ever have to do you ever have to remind your parents that <v Scott Simon>they should do that [Clasroom responds] When you guys go shopping do you think about <v Scott Simon>buying products that are recyclable or that can easily be recycled? <v Speaker 31>Some people bring their own like bag that's made out of yarn or something and they <v Speaker 31>carry their groceries in that. <v Speaker 32>Since we're like just 10 and 12 years old, we didn't have too much <v Speaker 32>time to make the mess. So why don't parents get as aware as we are about their mess? <v Scott Simon>It may be our youngsters who most pointedly remind us of something as basic as pick

<v Scott Simon>up after yourself. Nobody likes trash. <v Scott Simon>That's why it's garbage. It's literally refuse. <v Scott Simon>What we don't want. What we can't stand. <v Scott Simon>What we want to get rid of. <v Scott Simon>But our garbage crisis may maybe a rare example of that problem, that's overwhelming <v Scott Simon>but not impossible. The solution is literally in our hands. <v Scott Simon>We've simply run out of places in which to hide the problem. <v Scott Simon>I'm Scott Simon. Thank you for watching. <v Scott Simon>Good night. [Hip hop song playing] <v Narrator>Funding for this program was provided by the Environmental Protection Agency.

<v Narrator>Additional funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. <v Narrator>Down in the Dumps, America's Garbage Crisis makes a great gift for your home, school <v Narrator>or library to order a videocassette call 1-800-858-8678 Or <v Narrator>$19.95 plus 4 dollars. Shipping and handling to this address.