This may be a question we are asking ourselves along the Beaches Corridor of Lake Winnipeg. According to a news report I just saw – in Europe things are starting to go the other way around. Various companies are competing for the privelege of taking away the trash!

Garbage in the more environmentally conscious European countries has become a resource that people are willing to pay for! Garbage is being recycled and incinerated. With the price of non-renewable resources such as copper and iron, sorting the trash and extracting recyclable material has become profitable.

Some people in energy starved .Europe are even calling garbage the oil of the 21st century. One garbage incinerator plant can provide electricity and hot water for about 45,000 house-holds.

A few enterprising investers have even started shipping trash to far off emerging markets such as China or India that are paying top money for what westerners are throwing out. Just wait, soon there will be all kinds of Asians buying up and digging up our landfills.

So if trash is such a commodity, why are we still dumping it in holes and contaminating our water? 


1 Comment

garbage disposer · August 3, 2008 at 8:36 am

[…] energy starved .Europe are even calling garbage the oil of the 21st century. One garbage incinerathttp://blog.eastern-beaches.mb.ca/2008/07/27/charged-for-our-garbage-pay-us/Read “Re: Garbage Disposer Switch Kaput?” at Ask the Plumbing Experts Forum…as an example of […]

Leave a Reply

Avatar placeholder

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *