Garbage In, Garbage Out

One of the books I brought with me is the delightful Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte, in which she gets obsessive about her garbage (going so far as to pick everything out of the bin and weigh it) and explores just where her waste goes. It's definitely one of my fave books of the year, and it's an extremely enlightening reminder of just how much waste we all produce and the almost hidden fact of life--garbage management. As I read through it, I think I'll feature a few excerpts. Here's one focused on recycling:

Nationwide, beer and soda cans [ed. note: in Minnesota, it's not soda--it's pop] are the most-recycled consumer product. But their rate of return fell fro a peak of 65 percent in 1992 to a 23-year low of 44 percent in 2003, when 820,000 tons of aluminum cans were trashed. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that more than a trillion aluminum cans have been buried in landfills since 1972, when industry started keeping records. The amount is nearly equal in weight to the world's entire annual output of primary aluminum ingot. If all those cans were dug up, according to the Institute's Jenny Gitlitz, they'd have a value of $21 billion at today's scrap prices. The entombed cans have raised the issue of landfill mining, which might become common practice as natural resources disappear. Until then, waste managers will bury cans, and aluminum manufacturers will fight bottle bills while busily digging new bauxite mines and refineries, and adding smelter capacity in Iceland, Mozambique, and Brazil.

Just why is aluminum recycling so important? Here's a passage from earlier in the chapter ("Hammer of the Gods," chapter 7 to be precise):

Recycling aluminum also generates huge savings: it takes five million tons of bauxite ore, and the energy equivalent of 32 million barrels of crude oil, to produce a million tons of beer and soda cans. Make new cans from the old one, however, and all that bauxite, plus significant amounts of petroleum coke, soda ash, pitch, and lime, stays in the ground. By averting the transformation of these materials into new aluminum, recycling cuts energy use by more than 94 percent and avoids the same amount of air pollution.