Word: trashing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Japanese threw away about half as much. But even the U.S. figure pales next to that of California, where some calculations have the average citizen throwing away 2,555 lbs. a year. Says Attorney Jill Ratner, who is active in environmental causes: "In Los Angeles County we generate enough trash to fill Dodger Stadium with garbage every nine days...
Dodger Stadium, however, is not available for the purpose, and in a growing number of communities, neither is anything else. About 80% of U.S. trash is disposed of by burying it under thin layers of earth at a site known as a landfill. But an estimated half of the landfills in the country have filled and closed in the past decade, leaving about 9,200 with space remaining. Some 6,000 belong to counties, cities and towns. The Environmental Protection Agency projects that one-third of these will run out of space and shut down in the next five...
That is a simple but accurate description of a situation approaching the crisis stage throughout the U.S. The affluent, fast-paced, throwaway American culture is producing trash on a stupendous scale. Between 1960 and 1986, the amount of American garbage grew 80%, from 87.5 million tons to 157.7 million tons annually. It is expected to increase 22% by the year 2000, when the malodorous mound will weigh 192.7 million tons...
...facing these ((garbage-disposal)) problems in the same old way." EPA Administrator Porter has set a goal of having 25% of U.S. garbage recycled by 1992, vs. 10% now. Still, he concedes, recycling success will only delay rather than avert the day when landfills cannot take any more trash. Main problem with recycling: many Americans simply refuse to be bothered with sorting and separating garbage into recyclable and non-recyclable parts. Nor is there any practical way to compel them...
...plastic bags and left for collection. Householders should simply leave that grass on their lawns or rake - it into a mulch pile, ignoring and thus revising the cultural demand for a golf green-neat lawn. Another cultural change would be required to get Americans to recycle 50% of their trash, as Japanese do. Cultural change is notoriously slow, but it might be speeded up in this instance by the lash of crisis. Americans have always treated garbage as something to be forgotten about the moment it is picked up from the curb. But the day may soon be coming when...