Think Green®

I'm the son of a builder who was the son of a builder. It's kind of in my blood. When I want to relax, I build. I've built or help build my house, two cabins, a log sauna, a timber frame sugar house, a woodshed, and countless smaller buildings and improvements. I've got a smokehouse and barn in mind for the future. My mother in law says I have an "edifice complex."

One building ethic I learned young was to reduce or eliminate waste- the old standard was that a builder should never have more than a wheelbarrow full of scrap left after building a house. Every piece of lumber, pipe, roofing, wire was used or found another purpose in the building. A cut off plank from one place was used as a brace somewhere else. And when building was slow, my father and grandfather used to "unbuild" structures- demo in the trades- both to make income and to salvage the materials. Both the house I grew up in and many other buildings they built were constructed at least in part from repurposed lumber, trusses, stone, pipe, and fixtures. It was always just the financially smart thing to do.

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Solar Trash Compactors Save Time and Money, Gobble Up Emissions

Here's a hellish scenario you've probably never thought about before: it's rush hour on a hot summer day and your waste crew has to fight their way through idling traffic to collect stinky garbage from all of the trashcans the grid-locked downtown of a major city. It's a trash collector's nightmare… as well as an environmentalist's.

It all comes down to a reality that most of us have simply never had to wrap our brains around: Collecting society's garbage is an incredibly complicated, tedious, and fuel-intensive process. Well, thanks to a smarter, solar-powered and even Internet-savvy type of trashcan, the future of garbage collection may have a much lighter footprint.

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Modern landfill practices these days are hardly recognizable to what waste disposal was decades ago. "When I was a child, they didn't have what we would call technologically advanced landfills like we have today," says Judy Archibald, Waste Management's Director of Public Affairs for Pennsylvania and West Virginia. "Trash went to old town dumps, where it was burned. If the weather was just right, you would smell the burning trash."

Burning waste is now prohibited in the US due to a larger emphasis on public health and environmental protection. "The practices seen at the old town dump ended in 1970 when the Environmental Protection Agency and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Subtitle D standards were written and enforced. Those resulted in the environmental standards and protection that we have today."

Modern engineered landfills utilize numerous technologies to ensure safe disposal of waste, while monitoring air and water quality. Although we all generate waste, few know where it goes and how it is handled once it leaves the curb.

Let's take a look at a landfill to better understand what is going on below the surface.

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America runs on orange juice, chocolate milk, and chicken broth. OK, so maybe that's a little bit of an overstatement (and kind of gross). However, it is safe to say that a whole lot of Americans enjoy these products on a daily basis, and nearly none of them are sure whether the cartons that their favorite juice comes in can be recycled.

Until recently, the carton has been one of those magical items that consumers don't know what to do with. Should we trash cartons or toss them in the blue bin? Fortunately, Waste Management has teamed up with Tropicana and the liquid carton council to address this exact problem. Together, they've developed a plan to make sure America's love affair with carton-bound beverages is sustainable and environmentally friendly.

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