trash day

It is early morning and I have had my cup of coffee to start my day. The sky is slowly changing from the gray of dawn to blue and the roosters are crowing next door. They don’t crow just once or twice but seem to keep going on and on, I would think that their throats would get sore. Today is trash day and I both wonder and hope that the garbage people here in Orlando burn the trash to produce electricity like other municipalities do. It seems such a waste to bury it. I have been to one of these garbage-to-electricity facilities in Miami. They don’t immediately separate metal from paper, that comes later. First they burn the garbage in an incinerator. The ash from the burning of the paper products is sold to be used in the cement-making process. The metal residue is separated magnetically into iron and non-iron metals and sold as scrap metal to be recycled. Everything in the garbage gets used which is as it should be.

By the way the man in the picture was my coworker Sam. We were looking for an unknown radioactive object in the garbage. The garbage got dumped on the cement floor and then we had the unenviable job of picking through it with our Geiger counters. This building is the receiving building for the garbage where it is fed into the incinerators. Prior to burning the garbage for electricity, the garbage use to be sent to a landfill. At the landfill the garbage was piled up and became an absolutely gigantic pile which grew to mountainous size and was affectionately called Mt. Trashmore (a spin-off on Mt. Rushmore). It can be seen from many miles away, that is how high it is. Sort of like the pyramids of Egypt only made out of garbage instead of stone. This is a landfill in Dade County. In the first picture it looks as though we are at ground level, but not so. It is just the flat top of the garbage pile, much like a mesa out west. The elevation is actually quite high. Perhaps with the use of alternative energy sources and recycling we can preserve our resources. After all there is just so much iron and copper in the ground as well as oil and coal. I am confident that the future holds much promise as there will be inventions that currently I am unable to conceive of. Now that you have learned a lot more about garbage than you probably care to know, have a good day. After reading this blog the rest of the day has got to be better.
Lew