WASTE DISPOSAL AND RECYCLING

Centuries ago, long before anyone even thought of trucking garbage far away from homes and businesses, people used to throw their refuse out the windows into the streets ... hopefully when no one was walking by. Trash thus accumulated till it would reach the top of the upper windows and, soon enough, till it would bury the houses. Archaeologists have cleared thick layers of decomposed and intact garbage and sand to discover entire cities and civilizations heretofore lost under their own garbage. As the field researchers dug and dug deeper, they unearthed six or seven cities, each interred in its own refuse, one city on top of the other.

"Refuse is primarily an urban blight. Agrarian societies throughout history have successfully avoided solid-waste pollution ...." (Melosi 3). "In the late nineteenth century urban America discovered the 'garbage problem'" (Melosi 21). In a 1906 issue of Charities and the Commons (later called the Survey), the editor proclaimed the rise of sanitary engineering as "a new social profession" (Melosi 79). Yet, it is only in the 1960s and 1970s that Americans began to "link the resolution of the refuse problem to American affluence and the consumption of goods" (Melosi 20).

Today, we are richer and we have developed ways of packaging food, beverage, and non-perishable objects that make keeping and

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rtant now that we realize the necessity to conserve our fast depleting forests. "In 1990, about 22 million tons of wastepaper were recycled by U.S. paper mills, of which about 68 percent was used in packaging products" (Stilwell et al. 50). Recycling paper "can reduce water pollution by as much as 35 percent and air pollution by as much as 74 percent" (Stilwell et al. 53). "Overall use of paper in the United States is growing at a rate of four percent a year. According to an article in the National Law Journal, the average attorney generates one ton of paper each year. An advertisement from the Conservatree Paper Company, a well-known recycled paper distributor, points out that recycling that one ton of paper each year would save 17 trees, save enough energy to power the average home for six months, keep 60% of effluents out of the air, eliminate 3 cubic yards of landfill, and save 7,000 gallons of water. Most recycled paper is sent overseas. A quarter of all U.S. outbound cargo is used paper, much of it exported to Asia or Mexico" (Briscoe 43). "Plastics account for 14.5 percent of all packaging materials" (Stilwell et al. 60), and they can be melted, remodeled, and reused. "Society derives a greater, longer-term value
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3137
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)