The time to get serious about trash and recycling is

There is so much waste and inefficiency in the way the modern world deals with it's garbage and most of it does not have to do with what happens to the garbage once it's made, most of it is the creation of garbage in the first place. Everything we eat comes in disposable packaging, some can be recycled, but at cost and not everyone is required to recycle.

The biggest problem is that selling goods is what drives the market and pretty packaging is much more important than anything else. There are some concerns over safety and weight and cost, but very little thought actually goes into creating packaging that can be easily reused or is minimal for disposal reasons.

If people had to pay per pound to have their trash taken away instead of a flat fee for everything to be taken, you can bet their decisions on what to buy would be based more on the weight and recyclability of their trash and THAT would motivate the products to be more effecient and possibly even market light weight or totally recyclible. and everyone would invest in a heavy duty garbage disposable that would eliminate most food garbage altogether.

There is no reason at all why a big corporation that puts out multiple products of similar size and weight couldn't create packaging that could be completely not just recycled, but reused! A grocery that offered all their products in neatly stackable resealable boxes that they would offer to come pick up (AND WASH) could charge a fee and make considerably more money per product, while the consumer would be able to escape the trash fees.

As it is, the below story is going to continue to happen until something is thought of to do

Naples's trash is a challenge politicians are flunking
By Ian Fisher
Wednesday, May 30, 2007

MELITO DI NAPOLI, Italy: Business at Pizzeria
Napoli Nord is down 70 percent, and no one has the slightest doubt why: The
reasons include egg shells, fermenting teddy bears, garlic, hair that looks
human, boxes for blood pressure medicine, scuzzy wine bottles - all in an
unbroken heap, at places two meters high, stretching the length of a football
field along the curb to the pizzeria's door.
It smells bad.
"If you see all this trash, you don't have much desire to eat," said the pizzeria owner, Vittorio Silvestri, 59, who, like most people in and around Naples these days,
is very angry at the city's leaders.
For a dozen years, Naples and surrounding towns like this one have periodically choked on refuse, but the last two weeks have flared into real crisis, as much political as sanitary. The trash began piling high in the streets as places to dump the region's refuse officially filled up. The last legal dump closed on Saturday.
And as the stench rose, 100 or more refuse fires burned some nights - one of many protests for various causes that also included, inevitably, mothers clutching rosaries on railroad tracks. Even the beleaguered men whose job it is to collect the trash sympathized.
"The people are right," said Guido Lauria, who is in charge of
sanitation for a large section of the city, including the Soccavo neighborhood,
where his workers cleared away heaps of garbage Wednesday morning. "You smell
this. People have children, but animals come, then insects. And then they
complain."
The problems around Naples, a city long defined by both its
loveliness and squalor, are complicated, raising worries about tourism, ongoing
inequity in poor southern Italy and the local mafia, the camorra.
But put simply, the bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point in Italy.
As trash dumps filled up over the years, new places or ways to get rid
of garbage were not found, largely because of local protests or protection by
one politician or another. Years of postponing the problem finally caught up
with Naples (and by bad luck just as the temperatures rose, creating as much
stink as unsightliness).
"This is a situation that is tied to the incapability of the political structure," said Ermete Realacci, an environmental expert and member of the Italian Parliament for the center-left Daisy party.
Namely, he said, politicians of all stripes have been unwilling "to make strong
choices" to build new dumps or incinerators in any particular place.
And so, as the world's media fixed on trash fires burning in the streets last week, the nation's president, Giorgio Napolitano, issued an unusual "extreme energetic
appeal" to all levels of government, and politicians of the left, right and
center, finally to solve the region's crisis. At stake was not just public
order, he said, but "the image of the country."
The president's office normally holds itself above daily politics. But in this case, Napolitano, a courtly native of Naples, used his prestige to persuade the residents of one town - led by one devout and praying woman dubbed "la Passionaria of Parapoti" - to allow a closed local dump to be reopened for a brief 20 days.
That, combined with several other temporary measures, is allowing Naples and the
surrounding communities to finally begin digging themselves out - and hopefully
lower tempers here, too.
Already the center of Naples, amid worry about the risk to the tourist trade upon which it depends heavily, seemed largely clean, and in the last few days, the city's sanitation department has clicked into an emergency mode that has cleared away an impressive amount of trash.
But the dumps are temporary, the fires have not stopped and much trash remains,
compounding longstanding problems, especially in the peripheral neighborhoods of
southern Italy, where dingy high-rises already are plagued by drugs and the
mafia.
On Tuesday in Scampia, one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods,
drug dealers sat across the street from a dumpster spilling over with
construction debris and unidentifiable mushy rot. "It's never been like this
- I can't tell you why," said Sabato D'aria, 37, owner of a grocery also across
from the dumpster. Politicians, he said, only "talk, talk, talk. But in the
end you see very little. Unfortunately here in the south we are always more
penalized. Italy is divided."
There is also the problem of the camorra, which, experts say, profits extraordinarily from the region's endless crisis over its trash, much as arms dealers thrive in war. Experts say the camorra controls many of the trucks and workers used to haul away trash. But it also operates illegal dumps used more in times of crisis - and which experts say are far more harmful than legal ones to the health of humans and the environment.
In theory, a permanent solution is not difficult, and has been
proposed by an emergency commission: In short, greater recycling and the opening
of several incinerators and new dumping sites in Naples and the neighboring
provinces. But as has happened in several towns over the last two weeks, locals
that may be affected protest loudly.
"The reaction is very strong," said Marta di Gennaro, a deputy to Guido Bertolaso, the government's "trash czar."
She called it "an exaggerated Nimby syndrome," in which she said the
"not-in-my-backyard" protesters get disproportionately large media coverage.
And so, a dozen years after the crisis began, the only definite new waste site has been started in Acerra, a town just north of Naples - and people there have been complaining, too, perhaps with more reason than most. Three gray smokestacks for the region's only incinerator, set to start up in several months, rise from the town's edge.
But a field across the road has also been used during the last few weeks as a temporary dump, whose smell and pickings attract clouds of seagulls. Nearly every day, protesters have lain in the road to block garbage trucks. Trash was thrown in the mayor's yard.
"Acerra shouldn't die," said one protester, Filippo Castaldo, an unemployed 50-year-old. "It should fight." So it remains to be seen whether Naples is ready to
overcome its trash crisis, whether politicians can agree on where new dumps and
incinerators should be located. Shipping it abroad does not seem an option:
Romania, one of the few possibilities, recently said it would not take Italy's
trash. If difficult decisions are not made - and quickly - nearly everyone
fears trash will begin piling up again, with still more fires, anger and
questions on how this can still happen in Europe.
Peter Kiefer contributed reporting from Naples and Rome.