Your cafefully separated recycling heads to the dump. Reporters in D.C. follow some of the trucks around town and watch them dump the trash and the recycling together into the same truck. (previously)
posted by caddis on Nov 9, 2009 - 67 comments

Federal and state government officials and border activists say the garbage dumped in the Sonoran Desert by illegal immigrants and their smugglers is staggering. The cleanup is costing taxpayers millions. The Southern Arizona Project(pdf) is a multi-year program setup by the Bureau of Land Management to mitigate the impacts to the ecology by illegal immigration and smuggling. In 2006 alone, more than 1.18 million pounds of trash was collected along the southern Arizona border.
posted by netbros on May 7, 2008 - 22 comments

This guy saved all his trash for an entire year. It amounted to 96 cubic feet. Perhaps not surprisingly, his message is conservation.
posted by desjardins on Dec 31, 2007 - 22 comments

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation's video Synthetic Sea is pretty shocking. "All we can do is stop polluting and hope the system will clean itself up in hundreds of years." So, what will be the fate of the plastic bag until the inevitable ban comes? Should they be Taxed? Should they be Banned ? Should stores charge extra for them? We don't really have a lot of time to argue about it.
posted by chuckdarwin on Jun 27, 2007 - 36 comments

Dumpster World - "Your Dumpster Diving and Curb Crawling Resource." [via Information Nation, which also links to that story of a woman who was recently unloaded into a garbage truck]
posted by mediareport on Jun 27, 2005 - 19 comments

The WEEE Man is a huge 3 ton figure standing 7 metres high and is composed entirely of WEEE (Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment)--from washing machines to mobile phones and electronic toys. The WEEE Man represents the amount of waste a single person in the UK is likely to produce in a lifetime. Measure your own footprint here.
posted by fandango_matt on Apr 28, 2005 - 13 comments