The town dump has been our go-to garbage solution since the days of Ancient Greece. Now Americans send 740,000 tons of it a day to landfills, creating literal mountains of trash by burying $50 billion in raw materials every year. Other countries are powering whole cities with trash energy plants that pollute less than the archaic practice of landfilling.
—Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His new book is Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash.