And she bugs me again with praise for those who "stop landfills."

Yeah, if there's one thing we're not in danger of running out of in this country, it's landfill space.

There are issues though with the trash being separated by large distances from the available landfill space. Here in the northeast anyway.

Oversimplification seems the only way to communicate with a large portion of the population.

It does skip some areas of hopeful progress.

Production waste is also making it back into the diverted recycling stream and increasing numbers of production facilities seek less toxic alternatives as well as alternative "green" energy.

We have a number of landfills being mined or designed for energy production. Some local towns are generating electricity by burning the decomposition gasses at the landfill. Admittedly these are still less than ideal circumstances, but it is making the best out of some nasty consequences.

I think a great way to make people wake up to the overall cost of disposal is to make them pay the cost to dispose (preferably up front, like bottle deposits).

I was reading the other day about hog farms recovering gas from their sewage to be burned for energy -- do you know anything about this? Everything I knew about big hog farms previously suggested they were an environmental catastrophe; but if they are being built now with waste recovery in mind they must have to be a little more careful about runoff etc?

4: There's a movie about this issue.

Apo, get real. The government used to be in the business of providing service, and to some extent that is still true - the closer the government is to those it provides services to. But now the government is largely in the redistribution business and tax and spend - or borrow and spend, the case of the "long war" on our pocketbooks - to benefit fatcat insiders business. It doesn't protect us, but actually is used by the powerful to limit competition and to get other favorable regulation.

Sure we need to be fighting to prevent abuses of government, but MORE government is not the solution - at least not here. And the problem of misgovernmnent is even worse in the third world - that's how our consumer demand creates enevironmental problems elsewhere.

We will all get along better the LESS that the government does; since the more it does, the more we fight with others over getting the government to do what WE want - and more politicians and others invest in the kind of slime that Zappa sings about, to distract us from how we're being manipulated and ripped off.

Kudos to Annie for trying to educate, but the siren call for more government ought to be declined.

The American form of Government has long been hijacked by avaricious clods who think they're Jesus reincarnate when they make a sqillion bux by ripping people off. These asswipes drive Hummers for christsake.
Good government is by, of, and FOR the people. Education, health care, well-paid jobs and ethical business practices are all facilitated by ethical government.
When mendacious chickenhawks like Reagan say 'Government is the problem', they're blowjobbing their big business friends who can't steal enough to fill their empty souls.
Elect Obama/Kucinich and see what good governance means.

Apo, get real.

Not my post.

The old hog/cattle farm recipe calls for barns and pit lagoons of possibly millions of gallons of manure and urine, rinsed from the barns. From these lagoons, huge amounts of ammonia (smell) and methane gas fill the air. The open-pit lagoons can also leak or spill, releasing untreated manure into the watershed. Nearby water wells are also often contaminated. Bacteria in the lagoons works on the manure and the digested material can then be sprayed into fields for fertilizer. The fertilizer does still tend to runoff and contaminate watersheds.

Newer corporate farm options involve using better containment and separation of the effluent. A layered aerobic/anaerobic pond system then collects methane for energy production on site, followed by transfer to a series of ponds full of duckweed, algae, other macrophytes and fish. Having passed through this series, water is then safe to discharge into the irrigation system. These systems tend to use less water than the old way, and creates added byproducts like microorganisms, high-protein aquaculture plants and fish to combine with feed. Fish from these systems may be less contaminated than marine fish and are suitable for any market.

8: Same to Froz.

Admittedly, I fail to see how the cautious acceptance, and appropriate utility, of a certain level of government service provision is somehow "unreal" (given the, um, world that exists outside of puritanical libertarian fantasy-land) and requires said getting.

1: Yes. There are still lots more Indian Reservations on which to site them.