Landfill Quotes

By the Angel," Jace said, looking the demon up and down. "I knew Greater Demons were meant to be ugly, but no one ever warned me about the smell." Abbadon opened its mouth and hissed. Inside its mouth were two rows of jagged glass-sharp teeth. "I'm not sure about this wind and howling darkness business," Jace went on, "smells more like landfill to me. You sure you're not from Staten Island?

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

I'm not so sure about this wind and howling darkness business," Jace went on, "smells more like landfill to me. You sure you're not from Staten Island?

Baby, I have no idea how this will end. Maybe the equator will fall like a hula hoop from the earth’s hips and our mouths will freeze mid-kiss on our 80th anniversary or maybe tomorrow my absolute insanity combined with the absolute obstacle course of your communication skills will leave us like a love letter in a landfill. But whatever, however, whenever this ends I want you to know that right now, I love you forever.

Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out.

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

The real reason that the world’s landfills weren’t overflowing with plastic, he found, was because most of it ends up in an ocean-fill. After a few years of sampling the North Pacific gyre, Moore

My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. Totally different jobs, but my mother is just like, Like I said, they’re both in waste management. Two men, on a mission to help the country deal with their shit.

Hours are long. Wages are pitiful. But sweatshops are the symptom, not the cause, of shocking global poverty. Workers go there voluntarily, which means—hard as it is to believe—that whatever their alternatives are, they are worse. They stay there, too; turnover rates of multinational-owned factories are low, because conditions and pay, while bad, are better than those in factories run by local firms. And even a local company is likely to pay better than trying to earn money without a job: running an illegal street stall, working as a prostitute, or combing reeking landfills in cities like Manila to find recyclable goods.

They’re distracted. Good thing about living in the landfill,” he said. “Lots here to catch the attention of the fae. They’re so ADHD.

You’ll leave a trail of trash on this Earth that will far exceed anything of worth you leave behind. For every ounce of heirloom, you leave a ton of landfill.

No Surprises A heart that’s full up like a landfill, a job that slowly kills you, bruises that won’t heal. You look so tired-unhappy, bring down the government, they don’t, they don’t speak for us. I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide, with no alarms and no surprises, no alarms and no surprises, no alarms and no surprises, Silent silence. This is my final fit, my final bellyache, with no alarms and no surprises, no alarms and no surprises, no alarms and no surprises please. Such a pretty house and such a pretty garden. No alarms and no surprises, no alarms and no surprises, no alarms and no surprises please.

It made Daniel think. The people who had the least were the most willing to share. He outlined a dictum that he would believe the rest of his life: the more people have, the less the give. Similarly, generous cultures produce less waste because excess is shared, whereas stingy nations fill their landfills with leftovers.

The problem isn’t just the type of energy we’re using; it’s what we are doing with it. Even if we had a 100%-clean-energy system, what would we do with it? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste to landfill – all of which have ecological consequences our planet can no longer sustain. We will do these things because our economic system demands that we grow production and consumption at an exponential rate.

Find a bigger enemy than just a rival brand. It can be bad design. It can be time. It can be pollution. It can be ugliness. It can be bad service. It can be landfill. It can be complexity. But pick your enemy well. It will drive you forward.

I bought them at Toni's Consignment.' She counts off on her fingers. 'That's recycling, supporting a local business, and making sure that the sacrifice of these animals has a purpose, rather than them ending up in a landfill.' 'No, that's contributing to a culture that values fashion and vanity more than the sanctity of life.

A lack of “self-esteem” really suggests a feeling of shame over being one’s self. Shame is the landfill emotion. It’s not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else. A manipulation. Shame is very heavy, dense disappointment; somebody else’s, in you. Inside of disappointment is a deeper judgment: Less than. Inferior. Defective.

Of all records, Chase, Some Girls! It was in a clutch of the most horrendous crap, J. Geils Band, Sniff 'n' the Tears, the kind of albums you'd use for landfill.

Some people are just trash, and they find other trash and start to form a landfill. The internet makes it easier.

Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don't have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don't have to seem them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.

Crows are harbingers of death and omens, good and bad, according to Big Jim according to Google. Midnight-winged tricksters associated with mystery, the occult, the unknown. The netherworld, wherever it is- Portland? We make people think of the deceased and super angsty poetry. Admittedly we don't help the cause when we happily dine on fish guts in a landfill, buy hey ho.

History's what people are trying to hide from you, not what they're trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.

Each year, globally, Coca-Cola produces 3 million tonnes of plastic waste, and we know that almost none of this is recycled.60 A staggering 91 per cent of all the plastic waste ever produced has not been recycled and has either been burned, put into landfill or is simply in the environment.61

Technology allowed us to share our photos with more people now than ever before, but where would these captured moments in time be in twenty years? On some outdated piece of hardware at the bottom of a landfill site? What happened to memories you couldn’t hold between your thumb and forefinger?

It's just old black-and-whites,' she had said, flicking her wrist in the way one might dismiss a pile of junk mail. 'Relatives nobody remembers.' 'No,' I said, running to the box. 'Don't throw them out. I'll keep them.' I may not have known the names of the majority of the ancestors pictured inside, but it felt like a betrayal to send their memories to the landfill. I couldn't bear the thought.

And an even bigger army of Catholic missionaries marched in on your heels and told the Africans that if they used the condoms, they’d all go to hell. Africa has a new environmental issue now—landfills overflowing with unused condoms.

Just because people say you need a certain thing for a successful life, doesn’t also mean that very thing can’t eventually be crapped out by your cat and then scooped up and tossed into a trash can and hauled away to a toxic landfill. Okay,

Recycling is better--I won't write "good"--for the environment. But without economics--without supply and demand of raw materials--recycling is nothing more than a meaningless exercise in glorifying garbage. No doubt it's better than throwing something into an incinerator, and worse than fixing something that can be refurbished. It's what you do if you can't bear to see something landfilled. Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place. (269)

Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash.

Many conscientious environmentalists are repelled by the word "abundance," automatically associating it with irresponsible consumerism and plundering of Earth's resources. In the context of grassroots frustration, insensitive enthusing about the potential for energy abundance usually elicits an annoyed retort. "We have to conserve." The authors believe the human family also has to _choose_. The people we speak with at the recycling depot or organic juice bar are for the most part not looking at the _difference_ between harmony-with-nature technologies and exploitative practices such as mountaintop coal mining. "Destructive" was yesterday's technology of choice. As a result, the words "science and technology" are repugnant to many of the people who passionately care about health, peace, justice and the biosphere. Usually these acquaintances haven't heard about the variety of constructive yet powerful clean energy technologies that have the potential to gradually replace oil and nuclear industries if allowed. Wastewater-into-energy technologies could clean up waterways and other variations solve the problem of polluting feedlots and landfills.

Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out. The idea though is to be moving up the ladder, not down, like the McCobbs were.

The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what’s happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out. People have invented a ‘soft language’ to insulate themselves from the truth, he said, ‘toilet paper became bathroom tissue … The [garbage] dump became a landfill … Partly cloudy became partly sunny.

It is hardly surprising that the malodorous field of garbology has not attained the popularity of rocket science, oil exploration, or brain surgery.

Today's trend ends up in tomorrow's landfill.

Today Jacob is the Operations Director of the Kiefer Landfill Gas-to-Energy Plant for SMUD.

Creating a landfill in your home does not mean that you’re saving the environment. You just moved the garbage.

To abandon the past is to throw away all of the elements that will build my future. And that creates a landfill I can’t afford to fill.

The koosh ball was accidentally thrown away, and little did the landfill know what was coming: the blue bursting star of everything she knew, never smaller by one ray.

Shame is the landfill emotion. It's not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else.

Jahrling sat down at his desk and sighed. There was a landfill of papers on his desk, mostly about smallpox, and it was discouraging. On top of the heap sat a large red book with silver

If we as a society properly reclaimed all of the construction lumber heading to the landfill and the bonfire every day, we wouldn’t need to cut down another tree for twenty years, if ever.

everything I want online. It’s so much more convenient that way, isn’t it? Also more ecological, without all that paper to dispose of in landfills.’ I wasn’t interested in the environmental advantages

In short, our emotions don’t always lead us astray; sometimes, on the contrary, when we listen to them, they can save us. This can work not only when people are trying to make us live on the edge of radioactive landfill sites, but also in situations of harassment and abuse, like those outlined above. By giving some credit to their feelings—whether disgust, anger, rejection or resistance—by listening to the alarms going off in their bodies and minds, victims may find the strength to defend themselves, especially when the voice of reason is just a front for the debilitating, intimidating voice of authority.

So when you throw something in the garbage that could have been recycled and it becomes part of the landfill masss, you're contributing to human-forced global warming and, ultimately, envoirmental demise.

History’s what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.  — HILARY MANTEL

The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.

History’s what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.  — HILARY MANTEL “I

When we died, the only things we’d leave behind of importance were our deeds. Our corpses would rot and our treasured belongings would wind up in someone else’s house or in a landfill. Our clothes don’t tell the stories of our lives, and no one would remember what kind of dishes we had. But they’d remember the thing we’ve done. Our actions would live on and tell the stories of our lives long after we’d vanished from the earth.

According to one study, about 60 percent of all clothing manufactured around the world is discarded within a few years of production. That is equivalent to one garbage truck full of clothes arriving at a landfill every second.

We must realize that we don’t live in a vacuum; the consequences of our actions ripple throughout the world. Would you still run the water while you brush your teeth, if it meant someone else would suffer from thirst? Would you still drive a gas guzzler, if you knew a world oil shortage would bring poverty and chaos? Would you still build an oversized house, if you witnessed first-hand the effects of deforestation? If we understood how our lifestyles impact other people, perhaps we would live a little more lightly. Our choices as consumers have an environmental toll. Every item we buy, from food to books to televisions to cars, uses up some of the earth’s bounty. Not only does its production and distribution require energy and natural resources; its disposal is also cause for concern. Do we really want our grandchildren to live among giant landfills? The less we need to get by, the better off everyone (and our planet) will be. Therefore, we should reduce our consumption as much as possible, and favor products and packaging made from minimal, biodegradable, or recyclable materials.

And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?

A choking dry-ice smog of disappointment, pooling in the drops and troughs of suddenly uncertain ground. Mudyards, wit here and there the smoking wrecks of ideologies, their wheels and radios gone. River of litter rustling in a swollen course below the sky's black drag and in the ditches mustard gas, a mulch of sodden colouring books, imploded television sets. These are the fretful margins of twentieth century, the boomtowns ragged edge, out past the sink estates, the human landfill, where the wheelchair access paving quakes, gives way like sphagnum moss beneath our feet. It’s 1999, less like date than like a number we restore to in emergencies. pre-packaged in its national front hunting. It’s millennial mummy-wraps. The zeitgeist yawns, as echoing and hollow as the Greenwich dome. It’s April 10th; we find ourselves in red lion square....caught in the crosshairs of geography and time like sitting ducks, held always by surface tension of the instant, by the sensory dazzle. Constant play of light on neural ripples. Fluttering attention pinned to where and when and who we are. The honey-trap of our personal circumstance, of our familiar bodies restless in these chairs.

Thermophilic composting requires no electricity and therefore no coal combustion, no acid rain, no nuclear power plants, no nuclear waste, no petrochemicals and no consumption of fossil fuels. The composting process produces no waste, no pollutants and no toxic by-products. Thermophilic composting of humanure can be carried out century after century, millennium after millennium, with no stress on our ecosystems, no unnecessary consumption of resources and no garbage or sludge for our landfills. And all the while it will produce a valuable resource necessary for our survival while preventing the accumulation of dangerous pathogenic waste.

One of the more interesting things I learned from my first job as a foundation inspector was that preparing a building site means carting the topsoil off to a landfill. Sometimes the fine topsoil was sold as fill for use in other projects. Completely paved, Silicon Valley won't feed anyone again for the foreseeable future.

...until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt - not that anybody cared - like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children.

You see the impact of humans on Earth’s environment every day. We are trashing the place: There is plastic along our highways, the smell of a landfill, the carbonic acid (formed when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water) bleaching of coral reefs, the desertification of enormous areas of China and Africa (readily seen in satellite images), and a huge patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. All of these are direct evidence of our effect on our world. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate. Many people naïvely (and some, perhaps, deceptively) argue that loss of species is not that important. After all, we can see in the fossil record that about 99 percent of all the different kinds of living things that have ever lived here are gone forever, and we’re doing just fine today. What’s the big deal if we, as part of the ecosystem, kill off a great many more species of living things? We’ll just kill what we don’t need or notice. The problem with that idea is that although we can, in a sense, know what will become or what became of an individual species, we cannot be sure of what will happen to that species’ native ecosystem. We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.

American restaurants throw away an estimated six thousand tons of food every day. All that food rotting in landfills contributes to global warming—see, when it decomposes, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas twenty-one times more damaging than carbon dioxide. So no matter what you’re eating or where you’re eating it, be conscious about how hungry you really are.

But I'm a romantic. In real life, if Nick had killed me, I think he would have just rolled my body into a trash bag and driven me to one of the landfills in the sixty-mile radius. Just dispose of me. He'd have even taken a few items with him – the broken toaster that's not worth fixing, a pile of old VHS tapes he's been meaning to toss – to make the trip efficient.

Goldfish in a glass bowl are harmless to the human mind, maybe even helpful to minds casting about for something, anything, to think about. But goldfish let loose, propagating themselves, worst of all surviving in what has to be a sessile eddy of the East River, somehow threaten us all. We do not like to think that life is possible under some conditions, especially the conditions of a Manhattan pond. There are four abandoned ties, any number of broken beer bottles, fourteen shoes and a single sneaker, and a visible layer, all over the surface, of that grayish-green film that settles on all New York surfaces. The mud at the banks of the pond is not proper country mud but reconstituted Manhattan landfill, ancient garbage, fossilized coffee grounds and grapefruit rind, the defecation of a city. For goldfish to be swimming in such water, streaking back and forth mysteriously in small schools, feeding, obviously feeding, looking as healthy and well-off as goldfish in the costliest kind of window-box aquarium, means something is wrong with our standards. It is, in some deep sense beyond words, insulting.

By the Angel,” Jace said, looking the demon up and down. “I knew Greater Demons were meant to be ugly, but no one ever warned me about the smell.” Abbadon opened its mouth and hissed. Inside its mouth were two rows of jagged glass-sharp teeth. “I’m not so sure about this wind and howling darkness business,” Jace went on, “smells more like landfill to me. You sure you’re not from Staten Island?

They say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.

Don't think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing. For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

As we mine out the landfills (at least they left us a lot of plastic to reuse; that was thoughtful) and burrow into basements and archives seeking the books that our ancestors did not burn to survive winters, you feel it sometimes, rage filling you like an updraft of hot air from a fire, lifting you from the shoulders or blowing through you like a tornado—rage that we missed it, missed it all, and rage at those who got to have it in the specific way that took it from us.

Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets, which were then buried in landfill that had been dredged out of the Chicago River, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average. Tourists walking around downtown Chicago today regularly marvel at the engineering prowess on display in the city’s spectacular skyline; what they don’t realize is that the ground beneath their feet is also the product of brilliant engineering.

Language had arrived from outer space and mated together lizards and monkeys or whatever until it had customized a host which could sustain it. That first person had been introduced to the complicated DNA sequence of proper nouns and compound verbs. Outside of language he didn't exist. There was no method to escape. To feel anything, anymore, required ever-increasing amounts of words. Great landfills and airlifts of words. It took a mountain of talk to achieve even the tiniest insight.

Did you know,” North said, as he hung a feathery blue jay, “that real trees are better for the environment than fake ones? A lot of people think the fake ones are better, because you have to throw out the real ones every year, but real trees produce oxygen and provide wildlife habitats while they grow, and then, when they’re done, they can be ground into mulch to fertilize the earth. While the plastic ones just… rot in landfills. They can take hundreds of years to decompose.” Marigold waited until he was done with his rant. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.

The media and commentariat, for their part, could reflect on their own role in keeping the country’s anxiety at a boil. The trash barge story is emblematic of the media’s anxiogenic practices. Lost in the coverage at the time was the fact that the barge was forced on its peregrination not by a shortage of landfill space but by paperwork errors and the media frenzy itself.87 In the decades since, there have been few follow-ups that debunk misconceptions about a solid-waste crisis (the country actually has plenty of landfills, and they are environmentally sound).88 Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.

Getting a free refill The Refill scheme, which runs in lots of British cities, started in my home town of Bude as a way of raising money for the local sea pool. Local cafés offer tap water free to anyone with a refillable bottle from the sea-pool shop. It worked so well that it was taken to Bristol, where Natalie Fee, an anti-plastic activist, brought it to life. Refill now exists all over the UK, with an app that tells you where you can refill for free. As an example of how a simple thought can change the world, this is the finest. It has grown into a campaign with clout. It only takes seconds to refill a bottle, saves you money and prevents single-use plastic water bottles from going to landfill or the environment. No excuses, right?

Rich Purnell sipped coffee in the silent building. Only his cubicle illuminated the otherwise dark room. Continuing with his computations, he ran a final test on the software he'd written. It passed. With a relieved sigh, he sank back in his chair. Checking the clock on his computer, he shook his head. 3:42am. Being an astrodynamicist, Rich rarely had to work late. His job was the find the exact orbits and course corrections needed for any given mission. Usually, it was one of the first parts of a project; all the other steps being based on the orbit. But this time, things were reversed. Iris needed an orbital path, and nobody knew when it would launch. A non-Hoffman Mars-transfer isn't challenging, but it does require the exact locations of Earth and Mars. Planets move as time goes by. An orbit calculated for a specific launch date will work only for that date. Even a single day's difference would result in missing Mars entirely. So Rich had to calculate many orbits. He had a range of 25 days during which Iris might launch. He calculated one orbital path for each. He began an email to his boss. "Mike", he typed, "Attached are the orbital paths for Iris, in 1-day increments. We should start peer-review and vetting so they can be officially accepted. And you were right, I was here almost all night. It wasn't that bad. Nowhere near the pain of calculating orbits for Hermes. I know you get bored when I go in to the math, so I'll summarize: The small, constant thrust of Hermes's ion drives is much harder to deal with than the large point-thrusts of presupply probes. All 25 of the orbits take 349 days, and vary only slightly in thrust duration and angle. The fuel requirement is nearly identical for the orbits and is well within the capacity of EagleEye's booster. It's too bad. Earth and Mars are really badly positioned. Heck, it's almost easier to-" He stopped typing. Furrowing his brow, he stared in to the distance. "Hmm." he said. Grabbing his coffee cup, he went to the break room for a refill. ... "Rich", said Mike. Rich Purnell concentrated on his computer screen. His cubicle was a landfill of printouts, charts, and reference books. Empty coffee cups rested on every surface; take-out packaging littered the ground. "Rich", Mike said, more forcefully. Rich looked up. "Yeah?" "What the hell are you doing?" "Just a little side project. Something I wanted to check up on." "Well... that's fine, I guess", Mike said, "but you need to do your assigned work first. I asked for those satellite adjustments two weeks ago and you still haven't done them." "I need some supercomputer time." Rich said. "You need supercomputer time to calculate routine satellite adjustments?" "No, it's for this other thing I'm working on", Rich said. "Rich, seriously. You have to do your job." Rich thought for a moment. "Would now be a good time for a vacation?" He asked. Mike sighed. "You know what, Rich? I think now would be an ideal time for you to take a vacation." "Great!" Rich smiled. "I'll start right now." "Sure", Mike said. "Go on home. Get some rest." "Oh, I'm not going home", said Rich, returning to his calculations. Mike rubbed his eyes. "Ok, whatever. About those satellite orbits...?" "I'm on vacation", Rich said without looking up. Mike shrugged and walked away.

My name is Shit Turd and I am an American crow. Are you still with me? Crows aren’t well liked, you see. We’re judged because we are black, because our feathers don’t possess the speckled stateliness of a red-tailed hawk’s or the bewitching cobalt of a blue jay’s, those stupid fuckers. Yeah, yeah, we’re not as dainty and whimsical as hummingbirds, not as wise as owls—a total misnomer by the way—and not as “adorable” as the hambeast-bellied egg timer commonly known as a penguin. Crows are harbingers of death and omens, good and bad, according to Big Jim according to Google. Midnight-winged tricksters associated with mystery, the occult, the unknown. The netherworld, wherever that is—Portland? We make people think of the deceased and super angsty poetry. Admittedly we don’t help the cause when we happily dine on fish guts in a landfill, but hey ho.

Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.

I also worried about her morale. During Linda’s first season working for Amazon, she had seen up close the vast volume of crap Americans were buying and felt disgusted. That experience had planted a seed of disenchantment. After she left the warehouse, it continued to grow. When she had downsized from a large RV to a minuscule trailer, Linda had also been reading about minimalism and the tiny house movement. She had done a lot of thinking about consumer culture and about how much garbage people cram into their short lives. I wondered where all those thoughts would lead. Linda was still grappling with them. Weeks later, after starting work in Kentucky, she would post the following message on Facebook and also text it directly to me: Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world. After sending that, she continued: Radical I know, but this is what goes through my head when I’m at work. There is nothing in that warehouse of substance. It enslaved the buyers who use their credit to purchase that shit. Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts. It’s really depressing to be there. Linda added that she was coping

Deep underground, microbes turn half a century's worth of city waste into methane. The gases and leachate are extracted through an extensive network of subterranean pipes and then used to power 22,000 nearby homes. While 150 million tons of garbage gradually decomposes unseen below the surface, above ground, the former dump reverts to meadows, woodland and saltwater marshes, providing a haven for wildlife and a massive park for the people of New York. This is Fresh Kills in the 2020s. In 2001, the infamous landfill received its last, and saddest, consignments - the charred debris of the World Trade Center. Since then, it has been transformed into a 2,315-acre public park. Three times bigger than Central Park, it is the largest new green public space created within New York City for over a century, a mixture of wildlife habitats, bike trails, sports fields, art exhibits and playgrounds. This is poisoned land: fifty years' worth of landfill has killed for ever one of the city's most productive wetland ecosystems. Restoration is impossible. Instead, a brand new ecosystem is emerging on top of the toxic garbage

Because after all,” Bob said, “any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country’s renewable resources have produced all this? It takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you’re not rich, you’re living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you’ve withdrawn oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water, indebted by proxy to Japanese and German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who’ll be paying for your conveniences when you’re dead: who’ll be living six to a room, contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don’t, how long it takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you’re living in the black.

My dad always told me that there are three types of humans on this planet. First there’s the Sheep. The everyday types who live in denial—spoon-fed by the morning news, chewed up by another monotonous workday, and spit back out across the urban streets of the world like a mouthful of funky meatloaf that’s been rotting in the back of the fridge. Basically, the Sheep are the defenseless majority who are completely unwilling to acknowledge the inevitability of real danger, and trust the system to take care of them. Next you’ve got your Wolves. The bad guys who abide by no societal laws whatsoever but are good at pretending when it suits them. These are the thieves, murderers, rapists, and politicians, who feed on the Sheep until they’re thrown in prison, or better yet, belly up in a landfill alongside sheaves of your grandma’s itchy hand-knit Christmas socks. The ones you ritualistically blow up every year with an M80. And lastly, you have people like us. The McCrackens. The Herders of the world. Sure, our kind may look a lot like Wolves—large fangs, sharp claws, and the capacity for violence—but what sets us apart from the rest is that we represent the balance between the two. We can navigate the flock freely, with the ability to protect or disown as we see fit. My dad says that we’re the select few with the power of choice, and when real danger arises, we’ll be the ones who survive—and not just because we own a 357 Magnum, three glock G19’s, and a Mossberg pump-action shotgun, but because we’ve been prepping, in every possible badass way, since as long as I can remember, for the inevitable collapse of society as we know it.

When two or more specific assets are closely linked, the chance for opportunistic behavior is greater than if the assets have separate owners (Rubin: p. 8). Since the landfill is a specific asset that is required for the garbage company, there is a greater chance that a holdup may occur if owned by a separate company. This makes a compelling case for vertical integration even though, owning and managing

For every ounce of heirloom, you leave a ton of landfill.

Quality matters when quantity is an inadequate substitute. If a building contractor finds that her two-ton truck is on another job, she may easily substitute two one-ton trucks to carry landfill. On the other hand, if a three-star chef is ill, no number of short-order cooks is an adequate replacement. One hundred mediocre singers are not the equal of one top-notch singer. Keeping children additional hours or weeks in broken schools—schools that can neither educate nor control behavior—does not help and probably increases resentment and distrust.

Organic material smells bad only when mixed with nonbiodegradable items, as they are in a landfill, because the latter prohibit the former from decomposing properly. Since the preliminary stages of decomposition do not smell, you do not need to purchase a bin with a carbon filter—which needs to be replaced periodically. Your money can be better spent elsewhere.

But the experiment made me ask questions and learn a lot about the process. When we broke a couple of drinking glasses, I had to figure out how best to dispose of them: landfill or recycling? My searches on the Internet did not unanimously answer my questions and leaned toward sending them to the landfill, but I wanted to know for sure. It took visiting two different recycling centers, contacting twenty-one people, and shipping pieces of broken glassware to my glass recycler (tracking him down was not easy) to find out that my drinking glasses were recyclable after all (crystal ones are not, because they melt at a different temperature than most glass). I am not suggesting that you too put your glass in the bin (please first check with your local jurisdiction), but that you realize how complicated the system is, and reflect on the fact that for recycling to be successful, finding answers should be easy.

Highlighters: Not only can their felted tips lose their integrity and dry out, when highlighters no longer work, they are designed for the landfill. Colored pencils can serve the same purpose and last longer. As mentioned earlier, they also have the advantage of being erasable and their leftovers and shavings compostable.

Tired of Throwing Away Hundreds of Used Plastic Bags That End Up In Your Landfill? Looking For a More Eco-Friendly Solution? Here's a Smart Alternative That Thousands of People Have Adopted.

But if he turns into a controlling asshat, I’ll be disposing of his body in a landfill

My breath may smell like two inches from a landfill, but I'm a decent writer and one hell of a chef.

It is no coincidence that pollution so often accompanies poverty. Imagine a cost-benefit analysis of siting an undesirable facility, such as a landfill or incinerator. Benefits are often measured by willingness to pay for environmental improvement. Wealthy communities are able and willing to pay more for the benefit of not having the facility in their backyards; thus when measured this way the net benefits to society as a whole will be maximized by putting the facility in a low-income area.

(Abbey would, proudly, toss beer cans out the car window as he finished them, arguing that if the government was going to graze and mine the land into oblivion, worrying about litter was sentimental camouflage, especially along those linear landfills called roads).

Coffee Cups Every two minutes, people in the United Kingdom go through 10,000 coffee cups. However, what most do not realize is that these paper coffee cups are not recyclable. While most consumers assume that the paper cups are the more eco-friendly choice, most end up in landfills. Because the cups are not made from recyclable material, and they come in contact with the hot coffee or tea, they cannot be put with standard recycling. Technically, because the cups are lined with polyethylene, they

Egypt was so old, it had left behind a landfill’s worth of deities.

Maybe it's time that we started to farm plastic because it's already in the food chain.

Polluting facilities tend to be located in areas where residents are least able to fight back against them—communities where people of color live and where poor people reside. Stokes County is mostly white. Residents Black and white, middle class and poor, have been exposed to Duke Energy’s pollution and poisoned by it since it first located the Belews Creek Steam Station in Walnut Cove the year Danielle and Caroline were born. But the county’s poor and Black residents live closest to the plant, the landfills, and the pond and are least able to relocate.

I get it. Who wants to contribute more to the buildup of the world's "trash mountains" than necessary?... The undeniable fact is that every object in your home already exists. The resources have already been pulled out of the earth and manufactured into something. If you can't recycle it, presumably it's never going to become usable raw materials again... It is already taking up space... namely inside your home. If you send it to the landfill, it will be taking up an equal amount of space in a location...designated for disposal and...to protect the public well-being. Let your regret about how much you have to throw away reinforce your determination not to buy so much in the future.

When it's absolutely necessary, recycling is a better option than sending an item to the landfill. It does save energy, conserve natural resources, divert materials from landfills, and create a demand for recovered materials. Although it is a form of disposal, it provides a guide for making better purchases, based on the knowledge of what recycles best. When buying new, we should choose products that not only support reuse but also are made of materials that have a high postconsumer content, are compatible with our community's recycling program, and are likely to get recycled over and over (e.g., steel, aluminum, glass, or paper) versus downcycled (e.g., plastics).

We are a Junk removal and demolition company located in Portland Maine. Our services include junk removal, light demolition (Kitchen, baths, sheds, fences, above ground pools, etc), donations and recycling. We believe in sustainability and a better future for the environment so less than 5% of our waste goes to a landfill.

Anxiety is a serious and sometimes debilitating mental health issue that affects millions of people worldwide, but when you’re, say, trying to explain to another person who has not fallen down the spiral staircase of your worst thoughts why exactly you’re unable to walk through a grocery store without imagining every single can, shelf, and cart rotting in a future landfill, poisoning our soil and returning as radioactive carrots and kale, you have to admit that it’s also… a little embarrassing.

She tells me he’s really cute, but she has such bland taste in men. She likes the men she thinks she’s supposed to like. Her boyfriend has a big beard and an undercut, because when they got together that was the in thing. The boyfriend she had when we first met was this NME-cut-out, landfill-indie looking cunt with a porkpie hat and a huge fringe. She liked Harry Styles a few years ago, and now she likes that white-bread, absolute fucking baguette of a lad from Call Me by Your Name.

Years from now, when all the vehicles are electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can’t be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects,

There’s nothing quite so invigorating, so freeing, as piloting a gasoline-powered vehicle along an open road. Years from now, when all the vehicles are electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can’t be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects, I will still—always, always—remember this special and exhilarating night,

They’re always worried about how us brown people are getting radicalized, but nobody talks about how it happens to white people more than it happens to us. It’s really crazy.” “No kidding. Some people are just trash, and they find other trash and start to form a landfill. The internet makes it easier.

The facial stills that Mario lap-dissolves between are of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, founding standard-bearer of the seminal new ‘Clean U.S. Party,’ the strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone, -Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers, a surreal union of both Rush L.– and Hillary R.C.–disillusioned fringes that drew mainstream-media guffaws at their first Convention (held in sterile venue), the seemingly LaRoucheishly marginal party whose first platform’s plank had been Let’s Shoot Our Wastes Into Space, 150 C.U.S.P. a kind of post-Perot national joke for three years, until—white-gloved finger on the pulse of an increasingly asthmatic and sunscreen-slathered and pissed-off American electorate—the C.U.S.P. suddenly swept to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm that made the U.W.S.A. and LaRouchers and Libertarians chew their hands in envy as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.

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