"033, crackers . . . one item, brand Sunshine, type saltines, composition D." It^'s an imprinted plastic wrapper, hence D for plastic. "095 . . . one item, brand Wendy's, type hamburger, composition A." This wrapper is paper, and 095 stands for takeout meals. Along with other 095s—a plastic cup, a wrapper for French fries—it^'s evidence of a trend: People increasingly bring home meals from fast-food places, says Professor Rathje. Tucson households now do so an average of twice a week.

After a while Amy and I switch jobs, and I get my hands on a baby-food jar and a ball-point pen, a tuna can, a plastic toy duck, a few maggots. And a rotting dill pickle—Amy says whew, only diapers and spoiled chicken smell worse. The pickle produces an entry of 123 grams in the column marked waste; similarly lettuce, dark bread, long-horn cheese—not scraps but chunks of food, even beef. "When beef prices were rising sharply," says Professor Rathje, "even more of it was wasted.^" Any reason? ^"People experimented with cheaper cuts and didn't like them, or didn't fix them properly. Or they stocked up too much and the meat spoiled."

The garbage we examine is grouped by individual households, but, for the sake of individual privacy, these are never identified by name or ad-dress; instead, the recording is done by census tracts, care-fully chosen because they are inhabited by identifiable socioeconomic groups. Thus it was possible to report that some low-income Mexican Americans in Tucson buy more vitamin pills and educational toys than middle-income Mexican Americans and Anglos. Or—after interviews with house-holders in a specific area—that while only one family in four admits to drinking beer at home, beer cans turn up in the refuse of three out of four.

And so I can see that what Amy and I have been doing, when it's done systematically and long enough, can provide social scientists with solid evidence of patterns of behavior. As Professor Rathje puts it, "People will tell you what they do or think they do, or what they want you to think they do. Garbage is the quantifiable result of what they actually did.^"

DICTIONARIES define garbage as food waste, refuse, trash, material that's useless or unwanted; the mayors and county officials responsible for dealing with what their constituents throw away call it municipal solid waste. Trucks haul it to be buried in what used to be dumps but now are sanitary landfills—so-called because each day^'s addition is to be covered with an odor-and-vermin-preventing layer of earth. Once such a landfill is full, another must be found, or some acceptable alternative. That's become a nationwide headache lately, and how American communities have been striving to alleviate it—how we deal with our garbage—reflects notable national traits, as we shall see. Also a certain penchant for the lighthearted approach. Where but in America would a town spray its garbage cans with disinfectant carrying a subtle scent of lemon or vanilla, as Beverly Hills does? Or build floats for an annual trash parade and pick a garbage-bedecked beauty to be Miss Dumpy, as in Kennebunkport, Maine?

Alas, the basic problem has long been serious enough. Americans increasingly cluster in big cities with burgeoning suburbs—two in five now live in 39 such metropolitan complexes housing a million people or more—and while nobody can say precisely how much municipal solid waste these turn out, it's clear that each complex must con-tend with at least a thousand tons of it day after day. Increasingly, too, those garbage trucks must go farther afield as suburbs become more crowded, and the last thing suburbanites want is a new landfill nearby.

In 1971 Max Spendlove, a research director with the U. S. Bureau of Mines, popularized the term "urban ore.^" All the tin cans, wire coat hangers, bottle caps, pots, alarm clocks, electric knife sharpeners—almost everything the housewife chucks out, he said, is rich in iron, aluminum, copper, zinc, tin, lead, brass. "We can mine all that stuff. Our refuse is richer than some of our natural ores." Spendlove called it a phenomenal re-source. Soon widespread publicity asserted that there was indeed treasure in trash, gold in our garbage.

Enthusiastic engineers adapted ore-processing machinery, conveyor belts, screens, huge hammers, shredders, and magnets to separate ferrous metal. Also blowers, to waft lightweight material—paper, plastic, leather, rags, leaves—up and away so it could be made into fluffy RDF, or refuse-derived fuel, for burning alone or with coal in conventional power plants, precious energy! Also oxygen-starved, high-heat combustion chambers, where a process called pyrolysis would break down organic waste into solids and gas; as the gas cools, some of it condenses into an oil-like fuel, highly viscous and relatively low in sulfur—more energy. Best of all, the need for new landfills would be drastically reduced.

Fired-up salesmen from chemical and aerospace companies envisioned a major new growth industry and made bold promises: If we can get to the moon, we can help you get rid of your trash, and you^'ll make money at the same time! Local government officials were eager to be convinced; squeezed between growing garbage-disposal costs and pressure from landfill-resisting voters, as well as from ecology-minded people worried about a scarcity of resources, they^, could see "resource recovery" as a politically attractive way out. Pliant consultants supplied encouragement—after all, wasn't Washington financing feasibility studies and demonstration plants? It was the American dream in action. Optimism, faith in big-scale technology, due consideration for wishes of the electorate... .

The reality was sobering. Big resource recovery plants suffered delays, break-downs, and continuing financial loss. In Milwaukee the RDF from its 1,600-ton-a-day plant produced too much slag in the electric company^'s boiler; operation was suspended, and the matter wound up in court. The 1,800-tonner for the Bridgeport area in Connecticut couldn't consistently turn out enough of its Eco-Fuel II; the operating company went bankrupt. Baltimore^'s 1,000-ton pyrolysis plant never functioned properly; it was abandoned.

BY 1981 nobody talked much about gold from refuse any more. (For a notable exception, see page 441.) What had gone wrong? I thought, well, first I'll go see something that went right, after years of trying, in Saugus, Massachusetts.

"It's unique—it works and it's making a profit," says a vice president of RESCO, the Refuse Energy Systems Company, in his 13-story-high building painted sky blue with smokestack to match. He gets refuse from 850,000 people, two districts in Boston and 16 suburban communities (Stoneham, Mal-den, Revere ...) and burns it all as it comes along. Out of an average 1,200 tons a day, he says, only 200 tons go out in solid form—ash residue and scrap metal. The rest is steam, sold for cash. Isn't that wonderful?

From the cab of a crane operator high above the 200-foot-long receiving pit, I look down on a veritable Grand Canyon of trash where the trucks disgorge their loads. The crane man carefully chooses what he transfers, about seven cubic yards at a time, into the feeding chutes of the two refuse boilers. He seeks a good mix. A truck just dumped a very wet-looking load, so his next swing will include a lot of paper. "We're getting buried today," he says. "Boiler number two is down now for annual inspection.^"

Through a thick glass porthole I peer into boiler number one at a flat and fiery landscape, dark orange, yellow, silvery white. Black particles swirl up, float down. Periodically there's a jerky movement, a little earthquake—it^'s the grates making the burning mass move, on a gently downward slope, toward me. A disquieting shape jerks closer. What is this?

Must be a shopping cart from a supermarket, says the plant manager. A store detective was here looking for carts, they cost $100 apiece; people walk home with them and eventually get rid of them in one of those big communal collecting bins. More jerkings, and the mangled cart drops out of sight. Here comes a refrigerator... .

The boiler^'s 60-foot-high walls and ceiling are a mass of steel tubes. The heat turns the water inside them into steam, and that^'s piped to a General Electric plant less than a mile away, across the Saugus River.

How much does RESCO get for the steam? Sorry, I'm told, can't discuss that, but it would barely cover expenses. And for the scrap metal? "Very little, there's no dependable market.^" The plant^'s revenues come primarily from what the trash trucks must pay—the so-called tipping fee, $17 a ton, 7.4 million dollars a year. Herein lies a hard-learned truth: Whatever the treasure in trash, it isn^'t the materials or the energy one might get out of it—it^'s mainly what one can collect for just getting rid of the stuff.

LIKE DATING BEHAVIOR and the price of gasoline, the ways and costs of getting rid of garbage in the United States have changed considerably within living memory. A small-town former fireman tells me: "We had a dump and we lit it every Saturday afternoon. You got good volume reduction, and it sterilized a lot of what was left. You got a little smoke, but it was safe.^" You can't light dumps any more—too many people object, including the Environmental Protection Agency.

The New York City apartment house I lived in 30 years ago, like thousands of similar buildings, had a chute with an opening on each floor and a little incinerator in the cellar. Most of these had to stop—too much smoke. New York built 13 big incinerators, enormously efficient. But by 1981 the Clean Air Act had closed all but three; to meet the prescribed emission-control standards would have cost too much.

And now I'm driving in New York City's Borough of Richmond—that^'s Staten Island—past a housing development called Village Greens. Those houses were built around 1970 and bought in the belief that the gigantic landfill nearby, known as Fresh Kills, would soon be full and therefore closed. The real estate salesman said so. But no. Fresh Kills—3,000 acres, the biggest landfill in the world—still is fed around the clock by its remarkable garbage transportation system.

Trucks at special piers in the Boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens dump into barges. Tugs pull these to Fresh Kills. Wagon trains hitched to tractors lurch to the ^"active face"; bulldozers push wave after wave over the edge of a trash cliff 20 feet high—some 10,000 tons every day except Sunday. "We advance a hundred feet a day, on a 200-foot front," says Arthur Fama, the man in charge. Two stars on his cap denote his rank as a Sanitation Department assistant chief.

To my nose, this repeatedly compacted garbage exudes surprisingly little odor—if anything, it's slightly acid, as if coming from dusty pickles. Spots of color stand out in the brown-gray mass: deep blue, scarlet. I take a closer look—those are bits of cloth. Probably from the garment center, says Fama, in lower Manhattan. A good deal seems to be organic matter, mostly food waste. Sea gulls pick at it. What's the best thing he's ever found here

"Three thousand dollars," he says. "A lady phoned from Chinatown, she'd hidden her money in a Kleenex box and threw it out by mistake. We knew what truck must have picked it up, so we could tell the barge, and from that more or less where it went. She sure was happy."

Fama is testing a possible replacement for his bulldozers—an extra-heavy vehicle on big steel wheels with spikes that bite into the refuse, to compact it further. "With those we should get 30 to 40 percent more life span."

How long, then, can Fresh Kills take it? From the senior city official closest to solid waste, deputy sanitation commissioner Paul Casowitz, I get another revelation. "Land-fill is like soft luggage, you can always put in a little more.^"

At Fresh Kills it looks as if it will be a lot more. Another landfill—8,500 tons a day, in Brooklyn—must close because the site be-longs to the National Park Service and the lease is up in 1985. A 226-million-dollar refuse-burning plant designed for the old Brooklyn Navy Yard has been approved—for the moment at least—but opposition from upset residents nearby continues. Before long, Fresh Kills may have to absorb 22,000 tons a day.

It^'ll take some fancy engineering; the more weight on top, the more liquid seeps out below—so-called leachate, potentially a most unsavory brew. It must be intercepted and neutralized, lest it contaminate the groundwater. Poisoned aquifers and endangered drinking water are now emblazoned on the battle flags of anti-landfill forces across the country.

"We may have to spend 200 million dollars at Fresh Kills,^" says Casowitz, "but we could go to 500 feet." That ought to take care of all New York City refuse at least until the year 2000. What to do eventually with a garbage mountain 50 stories high? Who knows, maybe my grandchildren will practice downhill skiing on Staten Island... .

PROPERLY COVERED garbage serving as a foundation, so to speak, for healthful recreation is not, in fact, all that unusual.

In New Jersey the once notorious Hackensack Meadowlands, a wasteland of awesome extent, has been turning into a huge sports complex as well as apartments and offices; the latest addition is a three-million-dollar environmental study center. And should you be driving into the city of Virginia Beach, Virginia, on Highway 44, you'll pass a sign marked Mount Trash-more. That^'s become a recreation spot too; on top of old Trashmore the Cape Henry Women's Club lights its Christmas tree.

Just the same, I was astounded by the combination of garbage-generated benefits along San Francisco Bay.

Why is the affluent city of Mountain View (population 60,000) happy to receive all the garbage of San Francisco, 32 miles away—some 2,250 tons a day? "We're paid $3.32 a ton,^" says the mayor; the filling of former floodplain is extending the city^'s desirable open spaces by hundreds of acres.

What about those thick clay dikes within the landfill, enclosing four irregularly shaped depressions into which no garbage has been dumped? Those, said the man from public works, will form the four lakes of Mountain View's new 6,755-yard, par-72 golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones II. They^'ll tee off this spring. 

And what's that bunch of steel cylinders and struts nestled into another depression near the 13th fairway? It looks like a tiny oil refinery. Ah, that^'s for the gas: more revenue for Mountain View.

Thereby hangs a tale of biochemistry. Landfill gas is mainly methane—CH₄; so is the so-called natural gas from fossil sources, but here the CH₄ is produced inside a covered-up landfill by bacterial decomposition of moist organic matter in the absence of air. Pure methane is odorless, but landfill gas can have a bit of a rotten-egg smell. It's flammable. When mixed with air in 5 to 15 percent concentration, it's explosive. And it can migrate through soil. In Cherry Hill, New Jersey, it killed vegetation in the back-yards of 28 houses, accumulated in basements, and caused two fires in 1971. An explosion of methane that had seeped from a landfill killed two men working in a tunnel after one of them had struck a match to light a cigarette.

Proper venting of landfills does away with such danger. Moreover, gas wells can extract methane by applying a vacuum to draw it out, in the manner of a drinking straw. After removal of moisture, purifying, and compression, it can be piped into existing commercial networks that bring natural gas to customers for cooking, heating, and air conditioning. This is already being done in a dozen places; at least 1,000 of the 15,000 sanitary landfills in the United States are big and deep enough to yield sizable quantities of methane. Mountain View feeds into the Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) system, which supplies numerous bay communities including San Francisco.

"Please stress that our biogas is as clean and good as required by industry standards,^" says the expert from PG&E. He also super-vises experiments at Mountain View to learn how to increase the gas yield. Separate land-fill cells are injected with varying mixtures of moisture, antacids, and sewage sludge to help bacteria break down more garbage faster. Each cell is monitored, and the garbage enhancement outlook is bright. "But it's like an oil field; you can^'t be sure how much you^'ve got or how long it'll last." Mountain View should be good for at least 20 years.

And so, while San Francisco's dumping contract expires in late 1983 and won^'t be renewed, its old garbage will go on bringing income to Mountain View. Now picture this: A lady on Nob Hill enters her kitchen to make tea; she turns on her gas stove. Those little flames, that gas, could conceivably come from garbage she threw out herself.

SOMETHING SIMILAR and less far-fetched is in fact occurring on a gigantic scale in the People^'s Republic of China. My GEOGRAPHIC colleagues Mike Edwards and Bruce Dale glimpsed it recently in Shanghai: Garbage from an apartment-house bin is conveyed by a miniature tractor to the out-skirts and into an agricultural commune^'s digester, a methane-producing pit already stocked with weeds and rice stalks as well as animal and human wastes; out go thin, clear plastic pipes to little ring burners in individual kitchens. A man turns the spigot, strikes a match, and puts the kettle on. Different society, different technology.

In Denmark the refuse is collected in moisture-resistant paper sacks. ^"Better than plastics," I^'m told. They allow moisture to evaporate—less weight for the garbage man. He brings a new sack when he takes the full one away to one of the ubiquitous incinerators; the heat they generate makes steam to keep houses warm within a 15-mile radius.

Big garbage-burning plants function in cities across Europe, and quite a few supply heat to residential areas, notably in West Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and France. On the southeastern edge of Paris I visit the plant at Ivry; it looks just like the one at Saugus (actually the plants employ technology licensed respectively from Germany and Switzerland), but Ivry is bigger. Along with two smaller plants, it burns all the garbage of Paris and sends steam to an area covering more than half the city.

Steam pipes were laid not long ago beneath several streets near the Opera, and in a cellar a chatty concierge proudly presents the shiny red gadgetry now servicing her six-floor apartment house. "Our hot water is much hotter than before,^" she says, "and it costs no more than the coal did." Nearby the trash chute disgorges into a big plastic bag—the trashmen, she says, come in to pick it up before seven every morning, including Sunday.

Really? I tell her that where I live, in northwest Washington, D. C., they come only once a week. For a moment the lady says nothing. But my notebook records: "Odd look—'Oh, you poor barbarian.' "

MORE notebook jottings from abroad:

• West Berliners grumble, say city paying too much to East Berlin under current agreement with Communiststo accept Western garbage; it's trucked through special crossing point in Berlin Wall at Kirchhainer Damm. No East Germans yet sought escape to West through garbage gate, but 19 trucks found fitted for cigarette smuggling; buying in East Berlin's hard-currency shops yields profit of about four dollars a carton.

• Moscow garbage drops from apartment-house chutes through disk valves into underground vacuum pipeline, moves at 60 to 80 feet per second to central collecting station. Department of Municipal Purifications won^'t say how extensive this system so far; six-mile version under construction in Leningrad. A similar system operates in Walt Disney World, Florida.
• Japanese ways with trash impress visiting Americans. Walter Cronkite, CBS: They^'ve developed what they call the technologically most advanced recycling plant in the world. ... Harvey Alter, solid waste and recycling expert, U. S. Chamber of Commerce: They don't just experiment with pilot plants, they build the full-size thing—if it doesn^'t work they retire it. . . . Flip side of Japan^'s high-tech resource recovery: Small Tokyo entrepreneurs collect newspapers, magazines, cartons door to door, in exchange for rolls of fresh toilet paper. They call themselves chirigami kokan, toilet-paper exchangers.

TRAVEL IN ASIA, South America, and Africa sooner or later brings striking encounters with refuse and what^'s done with it. I'll never forget what I've seen in Calcutta—half-naked men toiling through the night to boil carefully collected animal bones in great vats, to get the fat out; in a cavernous shed bursting with boiled bones, noisy machinery grinding, sifting, and grinding again, exceedingly fine, for fertilizer. . . . And people sitting on the sidewalk patiently washing used coal, so they can sell what's left; it can still be burned.

A solid-waste consultant back from Sri Lanka tells me what he saw when the trucks reach the dumps of Colombo, the capital. The people rush forward first. Then the cows—ahead of the pigs and the goats be-cause they're bigger. Last, the crows.

A miserable way of life? Undoubtedly, in many ways. But these scavengers of all ages, scrambling to find something useful in the garbage of Manila, Jakarta, or Lahore, are basically different from those lone and furtive "bag ladies^" haunting the urban centers of the United States and Western Europe. These people move with self-assurance; they do have a place in their societies—a far from desirable place, but not necessarily one to be ashamed of.

The administrator of UNDP, the United Nations agency aiding developing countries, estimates that in many Third World cities "one to 2 percent of the population is sup-ported directly or indirectly by refuse from the upper 10 to 20 percent.^" He adds: "Present systems frequently provide the only entering level of employment for new urban dwellers emigrating from rural areas."

Samples of present systems: In Medellin, Colombia, every morning hundreds of scavengers converge on the "third mountain"; from a daily trash input of some 500 tons, about 30 tons of paper, clothing, cans, and glass jars are picked out, cleaned, and sold. In Mexico City thousands reportedly pay to belong to the scavengers union headed by a member of the Mexican Congress; some pay again to overseers at the big dump, to get a good spot.

And in Cairo certain communities made up primarily of Coptic Christians make their living by collecting, sorting, and variously using much of the city's household garbage. These people literally live amid the refuse they work with (pages 442-6). "Unhealthy," says an observer from the World Bank, "but one of the most efficient human endeavors anywhere.^"

BACK HOME I look with renewed interest at what's in American garbage cans. By weight, experts say, it^'s about 30 percent paper, 10 percent glass, 10 percent metal, 6 percent plastics; no more than 15 percent is food waste. When you add it all up, and allow for perhaps a quarter of the pa-per being newsprint and magazines, roughly 40 percent of the American household refuse turns out to be packaging material.

About 16 percent is yard waste—grass cuttings, leaves; nobody gets too excited about that. It's all that discarded packaging that makes the conservation-minded among us deplore our throwaway society, our wastefulness in the face of limited resources. We must change our life-style, says the League of Women Voters; let's raise our re-cycling consciousness.

We certainly do throw away a lot of potentially useful stuff, quite irretrievably. But what also impresses me is how much we are already recovering and how widely it^'s reused. Consciously or not, most Americans live literally surrounded by recycled material. In the home, it's the gypsum board for the inside walls, tar paper for the roof, thick waxed paperboard under hardwood floors so they won^'t squeak. In the car, it's the glove-compartment panels and stiffening for the sun visors, door panels, and backs of the upholstered seats—50 to 200 pounds of it.

All this is partly or wholly manufactured from wastepaper. From what was in the wastebaskets of business offices. From cardboard cartons out of the storage rooms of supermarkets. A big proportion of the supermarket packaging on display is recycled paper too: Open a cereal box; if the inside is gray, it's largely from old newspapers.

Take glass. Of the 46 billion bottles and jars produced in 1931, one in 15 was eventually crushed to bits and melted down along with fresh material to make new bottles and jars. And if you buy beer or a soft drink in an aluminum can, chances are better than fifty-fifty that your can was made from other cans; the time between its leaving the factory and dropping into the melting furnace once more may be only three months.

Two rules apply to recycling American style. Material had better be collected before it can get into garbage bags. And the operation must make sense in dollars and cents. For the fund-raising civic or church groups collecting old newspapers, for instance. For the dealers or brokers buying from them, to sell to a manufacturer. Especially for the manufacturer; if his orders are down or if he can't get waste material cheaper than so-called virgin material, he won^'t buy. And if somewhere along the line recycling doesn't pay enough, it won't be done, at least not for long. That's why the Environmental Action Foundation emphasizes to prospective col-lectors: know your local markets.

You can, easily. Classified telephone di-rectories in urban areas list dealers under "Recycling," usually also under "Wastepaper.^" I check wastepaper dealers around Washington, D. C. How much for a hundred pounds of old newspapers? That^'s a stack three feet high. One says 30 cents. Two others say sorry, don't want any now.

I make three calls to San Francisco: "62 cents. . . ." "$1.25. . . ." "$1.50, just went up." How come? Big order from Japan. I shouldn^'t have been surprised—that's how the market works.

One more suggestion—Don^'t throw out confidential records carelessly. Crooks rummage through garbage cans for carbons of credit-card transaction slips and use the information on them to order merchandise by telephone.

Conversely, law-enforcement authorities try trash surveillance on suspected crooks. It happened to Joseph C. Bonanno, Sr., of Tucson. From 1975 to 1979 his garbage yielded numerous incriminating handwritten notes. These led to a five-year prison sentence for obstruction of justice and provided clues for several major investigations of organized crime.

By the way, have you wondered what happens to refuse of the highest sensitivity,

from the White House and the CIA? It's shredded, reduced first to pulp and then to powder, and buried with assorted municipal solid waste in landfills in Maryland and Virginia.

THE U. S. LANDFILL headache is getting worse—so I learn when I ask the mayors of two dozen populous core cities about their refuse problems. For Philadelphia, Cleveland, Seattle—for the majority—the necessary new landfill sites are ever harder to find, ever more expensive. No problem, though, in Dallas: Within its gigantic perimeter lies a Texas-size landfill, presumed good until the year 2050; the tip-ping fee is $1.50 a ton.

The mayors talk about a new wave of resource recovery plants, most of them on the Saugus model, to burn garbage and make steam or electricity—not to make money but just to keep disposal costs down. Those plants will be expensive to finance at current interest rates; tipping fees may go to $70 a ton. But the biggest stumbling block seen by a good many mayors isn^'t financial or technical—it^'s political. People want neither a landfill nor a resource recovery plant nearby; they'll fight the idea with passion. As Mayor Kathryn Whitmire of Houston puts it, "They fear they^'re being dumped on, and that their largest personal investment, their home, will be devalued.^"

I've sat through endless county council meetings—angry citizens versus planners and politicians. It's always the same, a county planner tells me. "The technical staff suggests a site, the citizens there oppose it. So the council says well, surely there must be a better place....^"

From the local politicians' perspective, garbage may be a good bargaining chip be-hind the scenes—take this landfill and you'll get a nice school.

"And while it^'s always tempting to use the siting decision for any public facility for personal political advancement,^" says Mayor George Voinovich of Cleveland, "when the facility in question involves garbage, the temptation is almost overwhelming.^" What could be a surer vote-getting gimmick than to champion the cause of people who^'re already fighting mad? Garbage can be a demagogue^'s delight.

On the federal level our refuse is subject to certain political dynamics too. A veteran of environmental protection efforts during the late 1960s recalls: "Every publication we sent out said we'd be swimming in garbage by the year 2000. I believed it; I was out to protect America. Were those figures padded? Sure—you want to get your budget in-creased, so you talk about imminent peril, health hazards, whatever is sexy at the moment. Municipal solid waste was sexy for a while, then resource recovery. . . ." The sexy thing now, he says, is hazardous waste.

THIS IS a very special segment of the national refuse spectrum. The Environmental Protection Agency defines it as waste that's toxic, reactive, ignitable, corrosive, infectious . . . ; not a week passes without headlines about some old dump or landfill found contaminated with something presumed dangerous. There are incessant scientists^' warnings, public protests, toxic-waste editorials, legislative initiatives, government directives.

Will this last? The old environmental warrior thinks not. Government can^'t pay attention to one problem for very long, he says; and industry has been quietly working to drastically reduce those dangerous waste products. With disposal costs sky-high, partly because of new legislation and court orders, it pays to produce less of the stuff and get rid of it efficiently.

Looking back at garbage in America over the past hundred years, one can see similar ways of dealing with it emerging again and again—bits of history seeming to repeat themselves, as Professor Martin V. Melosi of Texas A&M has documented: An insistent theme in influential periodicals of the 1880s and 1890s was that garbage is threatening public health, we must reform, ingenious engineering will help. Municipal refuse incinerators were the rage in American cities by the mid-1890s. In New York in 1903 useful items were picked from garbage passing by on conveyor belts. A trash-burning plant in Milwaukee produced electricity in 1913... .

As I write, there is news about that exceedingly dangerous refuse of our civilization—millions of gallons of radioactive sludge left when plutonium and tritium are made for nuclear weapons. For 30 years it has been pumped into underground steel tanks. Some of the tanks have leaked and must be replaced.

The newest solution is the world^'s most expensive refuse and processing plant: A billion-dollar furnace to combine that sludge with powdered glass; then let the molten mixture solidify in ten-foot-high canisters of stainless steel. Construction is to begin next year. Where will those canisters be buried? That has not yet been decided; in any case, it'll be thousands of feet underground.

What about garbage-disposal methods of the future? Two former Atomic Energy Commission scientists, William Gough and Bernard Eastlund, propose a "fusion torch^": a gigantic plant employing nuclear fusion to reduce trash to its basic chemical elements, to ultrapure raw materials.

HIGH IN SPACE, mostly unseen by the naked eye, some 15,000 man-made objects are circling the earth. About 5,000 are constantly tracked by sophisticated technology: pieces of exploded satellites, nose cones, separated bolts, what NASA calls space debris. It's the refuse of man's most advanced endeavor—trash that may last longer than the pyramids of Egypt, longer than the human species, longer than anything else we know.

Or maybe not. I could hardly believe it when I heard it just now—an imaginative American aerospace engineer, Marshall Kaplan, envisions a scavenger satellite with mechanical arms controlled from the ground, to pick up orbiting junk that could be hazardous to space travel. A space shuttle would bring it back to earth from time to time so it could be emptied.

Imagine, a garbage truck in space... .

Photos

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Garbage in—sociology out. Sorting trash from Marin County households in California (left), students participate in the emerging discipline nicknamed "garbology," which seeks insight into human behavior from an analysis of what people throw away. Studies in California and elsewhere are directed by Dr. William L. Rathje (above) of the University of Arizona, who says, "What people say they throw out and what they actually do can be two different things."

Scavengers look like fire fighters as smoke from spontaneous combustion billows from Manila's Balut Island (first) refuse dump, a mountain of household trash 200 feet high that is gradually edging into Manila Bay. Municipal authorities, who plan to close the dump in the next few years, are searching for alternate sites. Meanwhile, scavengers who make their living from the dump fill bags with cans (second) for sale to contractors who have obtained salvage rights to the dump. A Philippine Army soldier with an automatic rifle and a pistol stands guard.

Blemishes on the Big Apple. When teamsters who pick up New York City's commercial garbage went on strike in December 1981, disposal bags filled the streets. Seventeen days and some 150,000 tons of garbage later, the strike was settled in time for a litter-free Christmas.

A Cairo community lives on trash

PURGATORY of human debris greets Cairo's traditional garbage collectors, the zabbaline, as they return home each evening, their donkey carts overflowing with trash (first). As happens in many developing countries, these rural immigrants, mostly members of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority, accepted the lowly task of urban scavenging for a livelihood and raised their trade to a vital public service. Living with their rubbish, which they sort for resale, Coptic zabbaline draw spiritual sustenance from their faith. This Coptic cross (second) was made from appliance parts.

COMMODITY MARKET, zabbaline style, returns Cairo junk to the consumer in a highly efficient system that costs the city nearly nothing. Flattened and baled, cans (first) are sold to craftsmen for recycling into gleaming new wares (below). The zabbaline actually pay garbage brokers for exclusive rights to certain collection routes, high-income neighborhoods being the most desirable. Men and children collect, while women stay home sifting and sorting the booty into great piles of paper, glass, textiles, bones, and metals. Food waste is reserved for feeding to the broods of pigs that Coptic families raise for their main cash crop. T HE HUMAN COST for Cairo's low-priced waste disposal is high. Since inflow exceeds outflow, the live-in zabbaline dump yards consume ever more land, forcing the squatters periodically to overstep their borders to erect new homes. When that happens, government bulldozers may leave angry crowds and grieving families. Objects of scorn by most Cairenes, the zabbaline suffer not only exposure to disease but also a lack of schools, health care, and other municipal services. A World Bank study has encouraged civic action to provide such basics as water lines and a composting plant to relieve waste buildup.

Monument to our throwaway society, "Worlds Apart" provoked a storm of controversy during its four-month stay near Washington's Watergate Apartments. Thousands of appliances compose the work by sculptor Nancy Rubins.

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