Talking trash: Indiana has the highest per capita trash in the country. Or do we?

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: AROUND INDIANA

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THOUGH MANY HOOSIERS go to great pains to recycle whenever possible, we're still sending a bunch of garbage to landfills.

How much do we dump in our landfills? More than 4,000 pounds per year for each and every man, woman and child in Indiana. It's 2.1 tons by one national estimate, 2.3 tons per capita if you take the tonnage reported by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management--14,542,880 tons in 2006--and divide it by the estimated 2006 Indiana population of 6,313,520.

Any way you slice the data, these rather embarrassing figures put the Hoosier state at the top of another dubious national ranking, as the state with the highest per-capita landfill dumping. Perhaps it's not surprising ... we have to do something with all of those candy wrappers that helped make us among the nation's most obese. The good news is that our dumping in 2006 was down from 2005, which was our most trash-filled year of the past decade.

But wait--is it really our fault? Are those candy wrappers all ours? It may come as something of a relief to learn that we had some help in generating all of that trash. In fact, according to IDEM, 23 percent of our landfill trash in 2006 came from out-of-state.

For that, we can thank our closest neighbors, especially those across the border in Chicago. It's no accident that the busiest landfill in Indiana is the Newton County Landfill, which in 2006 took in 2.6 million tons of waste. Of that, 1.5 million tons of waste was shipped in from Illinois. The County Line Landfill in Fulton County, meanwhile, took in just over half a million tons of Illinois waste and the Liberty Landfill in White County accepted just over...