Garbage : Trash Talk - America's Environmental Report Card - page 94

environmental scientists, economists, and landfi ll operators held the
fi rst international meeting on this topic, an attempt to show delegates
how to turn trash into gold. 16 With both commodity prices and land
prices increasing, every square mile is worth too much to use for a
landfi ll. And because of innovation by the recycling industry, the tech-
nology to process landfi ll waste is more readily available.
For example, Americans throw away 317 aluminum cans every
second of every day. About half of these, totaling 570,000 tons of alu-
minum each year, are not recycled and end up in landfi lls. The price of
aluminum in July 2008 peaked at more than $2,250 per ton, which
means that America is burying up to $1.83 billion worth of this metal
per year. There is now more aluminum in our landfi lls than can be
produced from ores globally in one year. 17 And 1 ton of scrap from
discarded computers contains more gold than can be produced from 13
tons of ore.
Really Bad Garbage
Not all garbage is created equal. The worst stuff is hazardous or toxic
waste, defi ned as substances harmful to the environment. They may be
poisonous, radioactive, fl ammable, explosive, corrosive, carcinogenic,
mutagenic (damaging chromosomes), teratogenic (causing defects in the
unborn), or bioaccumulative (accumulating in the bodies of plants and
animals and thus in food chains). Such toxic or poisonous wastes are
produced during industrial, chemical, and biological processes. Thou-
sands of landfi lls contain hazardous wastes that were stored in metal
barrels by industrial fi rms and buried by simply digging a hole and
throwing them in. Many of the barrels are now rusted and leaking
harmful liquids into the nation's water supply.
Industrial concerns are not the only producers or disposers of hazard-
ous wastes. Common household items such as paints, cleaners, oils,
batteries, and pesticides contain hazardous components. Clues to their
toxic character are words on their labels such as danger, warning,
caution, toxic, corrosive, fl ammable, or poison. Such products should be
disposed of in a safer manner than chicken bones and computer paper,
although there is no completely safe way to dispose of toxic wastes.
Among the safer methods are these:
￿ Land disposal Waste is buried in landfi lls that should be permanently
sealed to contain the waste. The landfi lls may be lined with clay or
plastic, and the waste may be encapsulated in concrete. However, there