Quotes & Sayings About Landfills

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. — Joseph Jenkins

Aside from its parks and nature areas, Singapore is intensively developed, and due to the shortage of land, is building up, down and on manmade islands and landfills. — Alan Huffman

I'm scared by the enormous amount of bottled water being consumed today, instead of people drinking filtered tap water. Did you know that nearly 90 percent of those plastic bottles are not recycled and wind up in landfills where it takes thousands of years for the plastic to decompose? — Robert Englund

Laws governing pollution tend to move pollutants from one medium to another. So, for example, we scrub SO2 from power plants only to dispose toxic sludge on land. We "clean" water only to disperse toxic-laced solids on farmland or landfills. Pollution control becomes a kind of giant shell game by which we move pollutants between air, water, groundwater, and land. — David W. Orr

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. — Tim Harford

We can't have landfills forever, and we can't ask others to accept our trash. — Jaime Lerner

For nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents-many emblazoned with warnings such as "CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy"-show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew. — Michael Grunwald

Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that'll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills. — Alex Steffen

A food waste reduction hierarchy-feeding people first, then animals, then recycling, then composting-serves to show how productive use can be made of much of the excess food that is currently contributing to leachate and methane formation in landfills. — Carol Browner

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. — Sara Gilbert

Food now represents the single largest component of municipal solid waste brought to landfills, where it also releases methane, a greenhouse gas 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And if that weren't enough, it costs Americans $1.5 billion a year just to dispose of the wasted food.17 The impacts of food waste are not limited to the United States, however. The footprint of food that is lost or wasted across the globe is estimated as follows. 28 percent of all agricultural land - an area larger than Canada18 38 times the volume of water used by all U.S. households19 3.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent; if it were a country, uneaten food would be third in its greenhouse gas footprint, after the United States and China20 — Dana Gunders

We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms from landfills to Superfund cleanups, from deep-well injection to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use. — Paul Hawken

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. — Edward Humes

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. — Mark Sundeen

Most places in the Midwest, you ski on piles of trash, like retired landfills. — Nick Goepper

By 1990, the EPA had tallied up 32,645 sites of past chemical waste dumping in need of cleanup. Some of these are actual waste landfills, but many are former manufacturing sites where drums full of chemicals have been simply abandoned. The names of the most notorious appear on the EPS's National Priorities List. These are the so-called Superfund sites, names for the super fund of money put together by Congress in 1980 to clean them up. In 2009, the Superfund list contained 1,331 sites. — Sandra Steingraber

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. — Dan Brown

The current system punishes communities which make the investment in creating landfills, only to have them filled by states which refuse to adequately address their waste issues. — Paul Gillmor