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

Australian town bans bottled water.
posted by flapjax at midnite on Jul 18, 2009 - 59 comments

How the Moon Became a Trash Can. [more inside]
posted by gman on May 14, 2009 - 65 comments

The site must be marked: What is here is dangerous(?) and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger...This place is best shunned and left uninhabited. [more inside]
posted by never used baby shoes on Jan 3, 2008 - 79 comments

These Come From Trees "Testing shows a 'These Come From Trees' sticker on a paper towel dispenser reduces paper towel consumption by ~15%"
posted by nthdegx on Nov 7, 2007 - 44 comments

So you want to own a dog, but without all the hassles of dog ownership? Well, there's always doggy daycare, dog walkers and even bakeries that cater to Cujo. But in the end, you're still stuck with the worst chore of all - picking up all the yard mines that Poopsy has left for you. Not anymore.
posted by itchylick on Oct 3, 2007 - 32 comments

The North Pacific Trash Vortex - Researchers have discovered a Texas-sized area of (mostly plastic) rubbish floating in the Pacific Ocean. [more inside]
posted by chuckdarwin on Sep 24, 2007 - 67 comments

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) published their latest Infrastructure Report Card in 2005. America's infrastructure got a D. The ASCE estimate that it will cost $1.6 trillion over a five-year period to bring the nation's infrastructure to good condition. They also have a Critical Infrastructure blog. [Via Gristmill.]
posted by homunculus on Aug 3, 2007 - 49 comments

Millions of tax dollars melting away... guess Katrina victims didn't need ice after all.
posted by miss lynnster on Jul 14, 2007 - 40 comments

Excellent 8,000 word essay on waste disposal in the endlessly superlative LRB. Andrew O'Hagen goes bin-raiding with Freegans, talks up Zero Waste, rides with the (contraversial) Harrow binmen, meets the Community Recycling Network, tramps over the Calvert Landfill Site and pays a visit to the London Waste EcoPark Recycling and Energy Centre aka the Edmonton Incinerator. Doesn’t meet any mafia though. 8,000 words and none wasted.
posted by criticalbill on May 19, 2007 - 10 comments

廃道レポート・東北の廃道・旧道・国道・県道・林道.
posted by hama7 on May 13, 2007 - 90 comments

Swimming with the fishes' feces. Too bad it wasn't whale feces. After a hard day at the fish farm you might need a drink. Or maybe all this just makes you hungry. Maybe it's just the ocean's way taking revenge on humans. We do so like to shit where we eat.
posted by spitbull on May 12, 2007 - 29 comments

25 y.o. whistle-blower. Last Fall, a 24 y.o. by the name of Justen Deal, blew the whistle on what he perceived to be profligate waste by his employers. As an IT guy at Kaiser-Permanente, he'd seen a $442 million database project scrapped by the new CEO and replaced by a sweetheart deal for one of the CEO's former contractors. Internal estimates placed Kaiser's losses on this new contract at $1.2 billion dollars per quarter [more inside]
posted by vhsiv on Apr 25, 2007 - 74 comments

Mr Fusion - coming soon. Startech Environmental Corporation's "Plasma Converter" works like "the big bang in reverse," creating nothing out of something. With the ability to break down any type of material (other than nuclear waste) into component molecules and and actually generate energy in the process, we may be at the twilight of the landfill industry. Via.
posted by jonson on Feb 17, 2007 - 54 comments

THEL (Tactical High Energy Laser) is an anti-missile weapon jointly developed by the US and Israel (at great expense) to track and destroy incoming Katyusha rockets. It had even been recently suggested to deploy it in Iraq. Unfortunately, it seems that the program was shelved in September 'cause it doesn't work. You know the rest
posted by Skeptic on Aug 1, 2006 - 30 comments

Radiohead's inventive use of the Web, integrating music and art with deceptively archaic programming. Cryptic web-labryinths, flickering video-collage (click minotaur), The Byzantine Ziggurat ("THE STRATEGIC DEFENCE INITIATIVE IS A ZIGGURAT IN HYPERSPACE THAT WE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH."), a "disturbing focus on psychological profiling," consumer survey, Spin With a Grin, The Eraser. Don't forget to consume.
posted by bukharin on May 16, 2006 - 34 comments

House and Senate GOP leaders announce the (Republican dominated) "Hurricane Katrina Joint Review Committee" which should ensure that no-one near the top of the (Republican Dominated) chain of command is in any danger of repercussions over the death of a great American city. In fact, it seems likely that incompetence will be richly rewarded: representative Waxman thinks that a Provision in Katrina Emergency Bill Leaves Government Open to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse. But that's nothing! Despite near-universal opprobrium as a dysfunctional bureaucracy led by an unqualified political appointee, FEMA will receive nearly all of the funds approved on Thursday -- $50 billion... (all links via TPM)
posted by dinsdale on Sep 8, 2005 - 44 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

Recycling ... Is Garbage. John Tierney looks at the reality of recycling and concludes it is largely a wasted effort.
Appeared in the NY Times in June, 1996.
posted by knave on Feb 16, 2005 - 41 comments

A Blivet. More nuclear waste than the planned repository at Yucca Mountain can hold will pile up at reactor sites as the government continues to approve license extensions for power plants, an environmental research organization claimed in a study to be released today. If a repository is built by 2010 in the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, its 77,000-ton capacity will be filled by existing spent fuel awaiting shipment. That's not counting another 9,900 tons that will have accumulated in the meantime from license extensions, according to the study by the Environmental Working Group.
posted by kablam on Oct 23, 2004 - 10 comments

There's Gold in Them Thar PCs. If you're worried about the growing problem of e-waste, if you don't want to ship your toxins overseas, you now have another option. You can recover heavy metals (precious and otherwise) in the privacy and comfort of your own home. Just make sure you leave a window open so you have some fresh air.
posted by alms on Mar 16, 2004 - 8 comments

Earthstation 5 is a new p2p application purportadly based in Palestine issue a challenge to the MPAA/RIAA. Sounds kind of fishy to me.. I'll stick to Waste with my mates (sharing legal items, of course) for a bit..
posted by Mossy on Aug 22, 2003 - 17 comments

Grinding Nemo. The JWC company, maker of sewage equipment, wishes to issue a press release informing small children everywhere that contrary to scenes in the hit Disney movie, flushing fish down a toilet drain will not set them free in the ocean, but rather melt them with chlorine disinfectant before shredding them into particles with processing machinery. Have a great weekend.
posted by XQUZYPHYR on Jun 6, 2003 - 22 comments

This week's most buried headline could be a real stinker this week for the Pentagon. Apparently over $1 trillion are missing as well as "dozens of tanks, missiles and planes."
posted by jackspace on May 19, 2003 - 25 comments

Jaw-drop-inducing link of the day The federal government spent $62 million on a building to store and treat low-level radioactive waste at a California nuclear weapons laboratory, then decided the structure wasn't secure enough. So where is the waste kept now?

... Right outside the new building, under tents.

posted by magullo on Jun 10, 2002 - 11 comments

Let's stop wasting US$ 78 billion a year. Is software development really this inefficient? Aside from the main theme, there is also an interesting statement from a CIO towards the end of the article. "Those folks [involved in the open-source movement] are very knowledgeable, very good at what they do, and they're producing really great code," [...]
posted by HeikoH on Oct 20, 2001 - 5 comments

Government waste. While the report had very libertarian leanings, John Stossel's special on how royally inept our government is at accomplishing anything is an indictment of the entrenched ways of doing things. There must be some sort of crossroad where liberal social policies can meet with real accountability without bureaucracy.
posted by owillis on Jan 29, 2001 - 21 comments