Landfills Quotes

• Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake.... During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast.

  William Rathje

  Book, Cake, Phoenix

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• Today's trend ends up in tomorrow's landfill.

  David Amram

  Trends, Today, Tomorrow

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• The current system punishes communities which make the investment in creating landfills, only to have them filled by states which refuse to adequately address their waste issues.

  Paul Gillmor

  Creating, Issues, Community

  27 Copy quote

• We can’t have landfills forever and we can’t ask others to accept our trash.

  Jaime Lerner

  Forever, Accepting, Trash

  "Curitiba: An Environmental Showcase". Interview with Roberta Brandes Gratz, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 6, 2013.

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• I'll tell you what me scares me is plastic. Plastic bags and plastic bottles and these things. Why does my water have to be in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean. And I don't know, I'm just terrified with the proliferation of plastic.

  Helen Mirren

  Ocean, Water, Scare

  63 Copy quote

• I saw 28 Days. I don't remember rehab being like a day camp or being that funny. Rehab is a dumping ground. It's a big landfill.

  Charlie Sheen

  Funny, Rehab, Saws

  Interview with David Rensin, www.playboy.com. April 15, 2011.

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• The Westgate Landfill is zoned for residential use. It's near a planned village. The Navy has a capping plan for the site, but it's not consistent with residential use for the site.

  James Young

  Navy, Use, Village

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• Why do we send valuable items like aluminium and food waste to landfill when we can turn them into new cans and renewable energy? Why use more resources than we need to in manufacturing? We must now work together to build a zero waste nation - where we reduce the resources we use, reuse and recycle all that we can and only landfill things that have absolutely no other use

  Hilary Benn

  Zero, Working Together, Energy

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• Emotional troubles are like landfill. Get them outside, and the air disintegrates them.

  Joan Rivers

  Emotional, Air, Trouble

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• We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms — from landfills, to Superfund cleanups, to deep-well injection, to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.

  Paul Hawken

  Nuclear, Use, Waste

  "Natural Capitalism". www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• I think if we're going to have to landfill trash, and I think we basically have to, we might as well get the upside for it and dedicate that upside to improving the environment in so many different ways.

  Ed Rendell

  Thinking, Different, Might

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• I love great locations in movies, and I couldn't believe I'd never seen a landfill on screen before. It was the most haunting place.

  Lucy Walker

  Believe, Haunting, Location

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• A product which is unceremoniously wasted to landfill at end of life surely can't be considered good design!

  Neil Tierney

  Business, Design, Management

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• ... laws governing pollution tend to move pollutants from one medium to another. So, for example, we scrub SO2 from power plants only to dispose toxic sludge on land. We "clean" water only to disperse toxic-laced solids on farmland or landfills. Pollution control becomes a kind of giant shell game by which we move pollutants between air, water, groundwater, and land.

  David W. Orr

  Moving, Air, Law

  David W. Orr (2011). “Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr”, p.113, Island Press

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• One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.

  Edward Abbey

  Byzantium, Oklahoma, One Day

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.28, RosettaBooks

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• We're looking for answers in a landfill instead of looking to people who bring the light.

  Christopher Titus

  Light, People, Answers

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• By 1990, the EPA had tallied up 32,645 sites of past chemical waste dumping in need of cleanup. Some of these are actual waste landfills, but many are former manufacturing sites where drums full of chemicals have been simply abandoned. The names of the most notorious appear on the EPS's National Priorities List. These are the so-called Superfund sites, names for the super fund of money put together by Congress in 1980 to clean them up. In 2009, the Superfund list contained 1,331 sites.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Past, Names, Priorities

  Sandra Steingraber (2010). “Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment”, p.69, Da Capo Press

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• Most places in the Midwest, you ski on piles of trash, like retired landfills.

  Nick Goepper

  Midwest, Trash, Skis

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• ... for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents-many emblazoned with warnings such as "CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy"-show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.

  Michael Grunwald

  Years, Toxic Waste, Environmental

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• Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

  George Monbiot

  Country, Fighting, Night

  "After this 60-year feeding frenzy, Earth itself has become disposable" by George Monbiot, www.theguardian.com. January 4, 2010.

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• Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that'll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills.

  Alex Steffen

  Powerful, Home, Practice

  4 Copy quote

• By the Angel," Jace said, looking the demon up and down. "I knew Greater Demons were meant to be ugly, but no one ever warned me about the smell." Abbadon opened its mouth and hissed. Inside its mouth were two rows of jagged glass-sharp teeth. "I'm not sure about this wind and howling darkness business," Jace went on, "smells more like landfill to me. You sure you're not from Staten Island?

  Cassandra Clare

  Angel, Islands, Glasses

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.339, Simon and Schuster

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• A food waste reduction hierarchy-feeding people first, then animals, then recycling, then composting-serves to show how productive use can be made of much of the excess food that is currently contributing to leachate and methane formation in landfills.

  Carol Browner

  Animal, People, Environmental

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• I'm not so sure about this wind and howling darkness business," Jace went on, "smells more like landfill to me. You sure you're not from Staten Island?

  Cassandra Clare

  Islands, Wind, Smell

  Cassandra Clare (2010). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instrument Series (3 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass”, p.309, Simon and Schuster

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• The pleasure of the mulch pile is incomprehensible. I wouldn't care if they just hauled the mulch to the landfill somewhere. Obviously, grass clippings are biodegradable, but when they're bunched together at the landfill, they become badly influenced by other garbage.

  Paula Poundstone

  Together, Care, Garbage

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