garbage

Latest Posts in garbage

A Dirty Business

A Dirty Business: What Ever Happened to Jimmy Hoffa?  It’s been 39 years since Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. On every anniversary of Hoffa’s disappearance, a new theory emerges about the location of his final remains. Here are just a few of them:

     • Hoffa’s body was put in a 55-gallon steel drum, and carried off in a truck, then buried on the...


The State of Garbage in America

“It’s a smelly, dirty, public health nuisance.”

“It’s a valuable commodity to be traded.”

“It’s a fact of life that will never go away.”

All three of these disparate statements above can be made about garbage, and all three of them are true, especially the last statement. The definition of garbage — or “solid waste,” as it is referred to in the landfill business — changes...


Let Them Eat Plastic

The city of Seattle's ban on plastic bags has been in effect since July 1, 2012, and yet if you walk down any grocery aisle you will encounter the seven basic types of plastic. Every sandwich, vegetable (frozen or fresh), sack of fruit, snack, beverage (pop, water, juice), is...


Trashing McMinnville

We’ve come a long way in the 35 years since a small, local garbage dump called the Riverbend Landfill was allowed to be built near the banks of the South Yamhill River near McMinnville, Ore. Even then people understood that a pit filled with rotting garbage was going to leak out into the ground and water, especially in this semirural area between Portland and Salem, where it rains a reliable seven or eight months a year.

“The...