Where Does Americas Trash Go?
HARTFORD, CT (AP) – It burns the nostrils and stings the throat, this is the stench simmering from the floor of the cavernous trash-to-energy plant in Hartford’s South Meadows. From your kitchen wastebasket to the garbage heap, this is what a tossed banana peel, a discarded detergent bottle, and an old phone book look like – multiplied by the 70 towns that haul it away to the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority’s Mid-Connecticut Project. Reams of paper. Bags of clothes. Computers, cellphones, and mattresses. Even fistfuls of loose change. The trash habits of our throw-away culture are astonishing. And few know this better than John Romano, who has a bird’s-eye view of the hot mess brought in daily. “Anything you can imagine, anything you can throw out is here,” says Romano, the facility’s manager. On a steamy Friday morning, he looks out over the “tip floor,” which a steady stream of garbage trucks is filling up. From his perch above this 4,000 tons of waste, he points out what he
