Remember all those scare stories about how we were drowning in garbage? Of course you do. There was that terrific scene with Andi McDowell in Soderberg's "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" where she admits to obsessing about the garbage glut.
Well, relax Andi, it wasn't true.
The New York Times reports:
Simply put, operators of garbage dumps are stuffing more waste than anyone expected into the giant plastic-lined holes, keeping disposal prices down and making the construction of new landfills largely unnecessary....So in the end the scare stories were just garbage.
The productivity leap is the second major economic surprise from the trash business in the last 20 years. First, it became clear in the early 1990's that there was a glut of disposal space, not the widely believed shortage that had drawn headlines in the 1980's. Although many town dumps had closed, they were replaced by fewer, but huge, regional ones. That sent dumping prices plunging in many areas in the early 1990's and led to a long slump in the waste industry....
[T]he waste industry is in the early stages of the kind of increase in efficiency more typically seen in technologies like computer chips and turbines that generate electricity. [Emphasis mine]
Read it here.
Two points are important here.
1) Environmental scares almost always assume that technology will remain the same, and of course it never does.
2) The failure time and again of these scaremongers to accurately predict the future does not, apparently, humble them -- but it does lead the public to adopt a healthy position of skepticism toward the endless predictions of impending doom.
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