Solving New York's garbage problems: more waste and fuller landfills portend a serious predicament. (Environment).

New York City is being buried under tons of garbage-more than 11,000 tons a day. What to do with it has become a concern not only for the citizens and government of North America's most populous city, but also for communities and environments as far as 300 miles away, where New York seeks dumping grounds for its trash. Any solution treating the symptoms of New York garbage production and not the cause--today's throwaway economy--is going to mean more trash in the future and fewer places to put it, according to Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute.

For more than 60 years, Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island has been the final resting place of New York's refuse. Once considered a "bottomless pit," Fresh Kills received its final load of waste on March 22, 2001, but New Yorkers haven't stopped producing waste. The city now plans to haul garbage to distant landfills in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, where local governments, strapped For finances, are willing to take it and bury it in their own backyards.

This solution creates its own problems, however. According to Brown, 550 tractor trailers each carrying 20 tons of garbage would be needed to move garbage from New York each day, forming a convoy nearly nine miles long. All those trucks mean traffic snarls, air pollution, and increased carbon emissions.

In addition, there would be more environmental problems at the landfill sites themselves. For every 40,000 tons of garbage, at least one acre of land is lost to future use, says Brown. And that's not counting the area surrounding each landfill that must be isolated to prevent human exposure to potentially toxic wastes and other environmental hazards.

Some communities are unwilling to take other people's garbage, and as landfills in adjacent states fill up, there will be fewer places to take New York's garbage. A more productive approach to solving New York's garbage problem might be to focus less on what to do with trash and more on how to avoid producing it, suggests Brown. New York's problem is indicative of the planet's problem, especially as everyone else begins to follow the lead of the United States and the rest of the developed world by using products and then throwing them away.

Convenient, throwaway products account for much of the garbage produced worldwide. The convenience of paper napkins and disposable diapers, for example, makes reusable cloth napkins and diapers less desirable for most people. Hundreds of millions of tons of municipal solid waste--composed of everyday items such as product packaging, grass clippings, furniture, clothing, bottles, food scraps, newspapers, appliances, paint, and batteries--end up in landfills every year, and the tonnage is growing.