Waking up to Garbage: January 2

January 2 , 2002— 7:15am

Dark and dreary, but clear. Sixteen garbage trucks in 13 minutes. If you resolutely turn your back on the shore, you can forget that there's a large-scale waste disposal operation in full gear behind you. But the trucks are very difficult to ignore for any length of time.

During the holidays, I read in the newspaper, all Americans together are producing something like an extra million tons of garbage a week. How do you even understand how much garbage that is? By comparison, Palo Alto's city landfill has a daily through-put of about 200 tons of garbage (since the vast majority of local garbage goes to Sunnyvale for processing and then on to a variety of final resting places). Even though, relatively speaking, 200 tons a day is a negligible amount of trash, even so it rises absolutely and at an alarming rate.

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Photo Marijke Rijsberman, 2002

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