Trash

Hats off to Mayor Sheila Dixon for finally taking the trash issue in Baltimore seriously ("Dixon's first order of business: trash," Jan. 26). City trash crews do an exemplary job considering what they have to work with - a resident population that often seems clueless and uncaring. It's frustrating that many people with more education than I have can't seem to understand how important it is to bag, secure and cover their trash tightly and put it out at the right time, not three days early.

For the past three years, Francisco Rivera has fought a losing battle against the trash piling up behind the Park Town Apartments complex he owns on Park Heights Avenue in Northwest Baltimore.As quickly as the 47-year-old landlord removes the pile of tires and debris -- at his expense -- the junk returns. So with wide-eyed excitement, Rivera walked down Park Heights Avenue yesterday to see what the blinking yellow lights, huge white trucks and crowd of people in the white baseball caps were all about.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- The United States is covered, swamped, buried in garbage, 85 percent of it readily recyclable.The largest man-made object on Earth, dwarfing anything you can name -- the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Great Wall of China, the World Trade Center -- is New York City's aptly named Fresh Kills Landfill. It is visible to the naked eye from orbiting spacecraft.At this date, with global deforestation, fouled air, manufacturing's dioxins and PCBs in our water, and 6 billion people, each unrecycled aluminum and tin can, glass and plastic bottle, Styrofoam peanut, cardboard box and piece of paper (office, fax, computer, magazine, newsprint)

Glenda Gentner lives on the right street in the wrong neighborhood.She operates Gentner Bed and Breakfast from a rowhouse in the 2000 block of Park Ave., which has all the flair of a Manhattan penthouse.But beyond her courtyard garden of potted plants and goldfish ponds are several Reservoir Hill alleys that have become lined with minidumps. Heaped with up to 6 feet of trash -- the result of illegal dumping and overflow from residential back yards -- these minidumps have become feeding grounds for rats, and fodder in an escalating blame game.

The men who haul away the president's trash might take away your garbage someday, too.Moving to expand in the Baltimore-Washington market, Waste Systems International Inc. of Lexington, Mass., said yesterday that it has acquired Eastern Trans-Waste of Maryland Inc., a Prince George's County company that serves the White House and other federal buildings."This is a platform acquisition for us," said Bob Rivkin, Waste Systems' chief financial officer and executive vice president of acquisitions.

IN THEORY, everything is fine. Baltimore garbage is picked up on schedule; streets get swept. Yet why is the city so trashy?Spurred by a Sun article about the dangerous accumulation of garbage near an East Baltimore elementary school, four college students took matters into their own hands. They rented a truck and started picking up debris. They filled 60 bags with trash -- everything from wine bottles and syringes to dead rats.A city public works official tried to stop them. "Do you young people know you're trespassing?"

Think of a landfill as a trash pie."There is a crust, or liners, at the top and bottom and trash in the middle," Beryl Friel, Anne Arundel County's recycling coordinator, told 350 elementary and middle school students yesterday as they toured the county landfill in Millersville.Friel, who had made herself up as Re-Re the clown -- with white face paint and a red nose -- greeted children from Annapolis Middle School and Cape St. Claire, Odenton, Van Bokkelen and West Meade elementary schools when they got off their buses to begin the second annual "Trash Odyssey" at the landfill.

City residents are responsible for own trashI am dismayed that The Sun's editorial "City must clear way for cleaner streets" (Oct. 15) placed the burden of responsibility for clean streets entirely on the city.While I very much applaud the students who took their time, effort and money to assist a neighborhood clearly at risk, I think that the perception you leave, that city government is doing nothing to address grime, is disingenuous and ignores all that really is going on.More attention needs to be placed on the personal responsibility of every citizen of the city to be a good neighbor.

TALK ABOUT YOUR multi-purpose center. Across Route 140 from the Reese and Community Volunteer Fire Company, east of Westminster, is Carroll County's Northern Landfill.But that, as the entrance sign informs you, is only one of the functions of this 220-acre spread.It is also the Recycling Center.And the Hap Baker Firearms Facility.Some places may build golf courses or parks on landfills. In Carroll County, the need is for a public firing range.Recycling here means reuse. At the Swap Shop shed, you might find an old TV, a serviceable skateboard, castoff toilets, an assortment of split-seam recliners.

Carroll County missed a deadline last week to provide a building where county trash will await transfer to an incinerator, but the state agency that set the deadline isn't cutting off the trash flow.The Maryland Department of the Environment will allow the county to continue until Sept. 30 to place trash atop the landfill near Reese until it can be trucked to a York, Pa., incinerator.In May 1997, the county signed a five-year contract with Waste Management Inc. of Oak Brook, Ill., for it to transport Carroll's refuse to the incinerator.

Message in a bottle? That's just trash One day you are at the beach enjoying your hard-earned vacation. It's a wonderful, sunny day. The sand looks great after being groomed last night. The waves are coming in nice sets. The dolphins are playing offshore. You decide to go ride your boogie board in the surf. Just then, out of nowhere, comes a glass bottle and slams you in the head. Or perhaps, as you are walking out in the surf to get to those perfect waves, you step on a large piece of glass from a bottle that has just smashed against the rock jetty.

The word is out and the anxiety is growing. In neighborhoods rich and poor, black and white, neat and messy Baltimoreans are keenly aware that a decades-old, twice-a-week rhythm of their lives is about to be disrupted. Soon the garbage trucks that pick up their trash will clatter down their streets just once a week. Oh, another truck will come a couple of days later, but it will only take recyclables, those mostly non-offending papers, boxes, bottles and cans - not the crab shells, baby diapers, cat litter, moldy bread and bruised spinach you don't want sitting around for the week in between pickups.

The Baltimore City Council approved a new plan to reduce trash collection to once a week, passing one of the mayor's top legislative priorities on an 8-to-5 vote. "It is really a mind-set; people have to change," Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon said after the vote. The legislation also increases recycling pickup to once a week, from once every other week, a move that fits with the mayor's goal to promote a "greener" city. The new plan goes into effect July 14 and coincides with a broader shift in collection routes, which will mean almost every neighborhood will have a new trash day. Those dates will be unveiled in coming weeks.

Before a vote to cut trash collection to once a week, Baltimore City Councilman Nick D'Adamo didn't just raise the specter of illegal dumping. He copped to it. D'Adamo announced at a City Council meeting this week that after he and his family polish off a crab dinner, they don't wait for the trash truck to come along to get rid of the shells. "When I eat crabs, I take it to the closest Dumpster," D'Adamo said, according to The Baltimore Sun's Annie Linskey. "Or I take them to the nearest municipal trash can."

Trash limit meets needs of families For a column purportedly based on math, "Trash math problem" (Commentary, April 15) does a bad job drawing inferences from numbers. It is true, as the author writes, that the Environmental Protection Agency has found that the average American produces 4.62 pounds of waste a day. However, it is incorrect to suggest all this waste would be handled by the city's household trash disposal program. The EPA based this figure on aggregate municipal waste production, including waste from commercial ventures such as restaurants and supermarkets that would not be affected by the 64-gallon household limit the city is proposing.

At first glance, it seems like a good idea. Instead of building landfills and burying millions of tons of trash, Frederick and Carroll are considering construction of a waste-to-energy plant. Advocates say the plant would reduce by 90 percent the volume of trash the two counties would have to dispose of and generate enough electricity to power 1,000 homes annually. But there are lots of reasons why this project should not be built. For one, the only plant site under consideration is in an industrial park on the edge of the Monocacy National Battlefield south of Frederick.

Efforts to boost recycling collections are getting extra emphasis in Howard and Anne Arundel counties as officials contemplate the looming end of their bargain-price trash disposal contracts. Both jurisdictions have shipped most of their residential trash by train from Annapolis Junction on their common border to a private commercial landfill in Virginia for $33 a ton since the mid-1990s. That contract with Waste Management Inc. will expire in five years, and the cost of any new agreement is expected to more than double.

As he walked to work each morning, John Kellett had a view of the Inner Harbor, downtown Baltimore's tallest buildings and the mouth of the Jones Falls. The trouble with Kellett is that he couldn't keep his eyes off the trash. "People would look off this bridge and say, `This harbor's disgusting,'" said Kellett, referring to the soda bottles, takeout food containers and candy wrappers floating in the water under a footbridge. "A lot of people's first impression of the harbor was this trash."

Carroll County officials are considering ways of recovering more recyclable materials rather than landfilling the waste or hauling it away. In the next three months, waste consultant Richard V. Anthony of San Diego, Calif., will prepare a report advising Carroll how to throw away less trash, based on last week's meetings with local agricultural, environmental and business leaders, trash haulers and county and municipal employees. These sessions on how to generate less waste come as the Carroll County Environmental Advisory Council has urged the commissioners to increase local recycling efforts rather than first building an expensive waste-to-energy trash-burning facility with Frederick County.

Lenders' greed now hurts homeowners All the talk about subprime mortgage markets causing losses for banks, markets and investors worldwide has given little attention to the root of the problem: Many of the lenders and investors got too greedy ("Fallout from U.S. rattles world markets," Aug. 10). Some of those defaulting on home loans may be guilty of borrowing too much or of misrepresenting their ability to pay. But for many of us the unjustified ballooning of our interest rates is the real root of the problem.