composting

As summer heats up, our thoughts return to garbage--specifically New York City's garbage. As I've mentioned before, it would be hard to invent a more environmentally damaging, or more expensive system of waste management, than the one we use. To reiterate--in New York City we collect the garbage that residents place on the curb and then dump it on the floor of huge warehouses that tend to be located in low-income neighborhoods. We then scoop it up and load it on to trailer trucks and ship it far away--mostly to landfills (dumps), or waste-to-energy plants (incinerators). In the old days, when we had more vacant land in the city, we dumped the garbage in our own landfills.  read more »