The crisis that wasn't: building a better garbage dump.

• Author: Taylor, Jeff
• Position: Citings - Brief Article

The news that America was not running out of landfill space had The New York Times all aflutter in August. Waste disposal, the Times decreed, was an "unlikely industry" for productivity improvements. "Simply put, operators of garbage dumps are stuffing more waste than anyone expected into the giant plastic-lined holes, keeping disposal prices down and making the construction of new landfills largely unnecessary," read the Times version of history.

Except that precisely this kind of waste disposal efficiency increase was predicted a dozen years ago by experts who studied humanity's disposal habits over the centuries. In their 1992 book Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage, William Rathje and Cullen Murphy noted the historical forces that drive cultures to be more efficient in dealing with garbage.

"It is a common story, usually driven by economic realities," they noted. Rathje and Murphy expected America to...