Talking dirty

To get the garbage out of New York City each day takes 450 tractor-trailer rigs which use a total of about 33,700 gallons of diesel fuel on their round trip to Pennsylvania. For every barrel of waste we put on the curb, there are 71 barrels of waste generated upstream in manufacturing the stuff we bought to produce the garbage. Over 163,000 computers and televisions become obsolete every day, and most end up in landfills, legal or not.

Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land is filled with information that will make you sick, or at least embarrassed (I hope).

The collective “we” talk a lot about waste reduction, but few can do the dance, it seems. Several communities in the Yukon (including Carcross) still burn garbage – perhaps you have to see a derelict chest freezer burning to appreciate that burning should be a criminal offence, particularly in the sort of areas that most of our dumps are located. The end of 2008 is supposed to be the end of burning – then what do we do, truck it to Whitehorse?