Several years ago, former Vice-President Al Gore appeared on Saturday Night Live and, in a skit based on the premise that he won the 2000 election and was addressing the nation from the Oval Office, said that he had mandated that cars run on trash. The joke got a big laugh from the studio audience, surely in part because the idea seemed a little wacky.

Well, wacky may be getting closer to reality than we could have imagined then.

According to this report from a Northwestern Medill School of Journalism newspaper, Lake County, Ind., may soon be home to the “first commercial-scale plants in the country [that] turn garbage into ethanol.”

Indiana Ethanol Power LLC has submitted a proposal to the county’s Solid Waste Management District for a facility that would use a process called “weak-acid hydrolysis” to convert trash into roughly 20 million gallons of ethanol a year, the paper says. Meanwhile, Genahol-Powers 1 LLC is seeking the county’s permission to build a facility that would burn trash to produce approximately 30 million gallons of ethanol annually.

If the district approves the proposals at a June meeting, then the plants could conceivably be up and running within two years, according to the paper. However, the local Sierra Club is voicing concerns about the technology that would be used in the Genahol plant.

“It’s still kind of an old-fashioned technology,” Sandy O’Brien, chair of the Dunelands Sierra Club, told the newspaper. “They’ll be burning things they could be recycling, like plastic.”

The Lake County news comes nearly a month after Waste Management announced that it has partnered with Linde North America to develop a Northern California facility that will convert landfill gas into liquified natural gas (LNG) to fuel area collection trucks. The facility is slated to open next year and Waste Management says it will produce roughly 13,000 gallons of LNG a day.

So, what’s your take? Will this prove to be a viable end use for trash?

While recycling materials is still more expensive for New York City than landfilling them, the cost difference is shrinking, according to a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that is summarized in today’s New York Times. And recycling could even be cheaper for the city than landfilling within half a decade, the report adds.

The study, which was released by NRDC on Wednesday, says it costs the city $284 a ton to recycle glass, plastic, metal and paper, and $267 to landfill the materials. According to the Times, the cost difference was between $34 and $48 in 2004.

“Here is proof positive that recycling is cost-competitive with other waste disposal, to say nothing of cutting the city’s contribution to global warming,” said Eric Goldstein, a senior lawyer at NRDC, in the Times’ article.

And, so far at least, the city appears to be comfortable with the figures cited in the report. “We have no big disagreement with how they want to look at the numbers,” said Lorenzo Cipollina, deputy commissioner for financial management for New York’s Department of Sanitation.

Everyone more or less concedes that phone books have long outlived their usefulness. And yet they WILL NOT GO AWAY. A great (and highly amusing) article published today in Slate looks at some of consequences of continuing to produce a massive stack of paper that almost nobody uses.

Of particular interest:

That waste is a truly weighty issue. In Portland, Ore., alone this year, the Dex directories tipped the scales at 10.5 pounds per pair, consumed the equivalent of 49,779 trees, and could be stacked nearly 12 miles high into the stratosphere. And that’s just one of several directories that Portlanders receive. On a national level, the figures become mind-boggling. If we assign the not-terribly-scientific figure of just more than three pounds to the average directory, then the 615 million volumes produced last year come out to 1 million tons of phone books. Still, the Yellow Pages Association claims that phone books produce only 0.3 percent of the household waste stream—while “newspapers, in comparison, represent 4.9%.” Alas, customers ask for newspapers, and they do offer an opt-out—it’s called canceling your subscription.

It doesn’t help that the phone book industry’s history of recycling has been … well, nothing to call home about. NYNEX, for instance, once worked with wastepaper merchants to recover about half of all directories but gave up in 1959, with the onset of throwaway consumerism. After New York’s attorney general inquired about recycling plans in 1971, NYNEX responded that it was looking into the matter. They must have looked very hard, since they didn’t start again for another 19 years. Even today, phone books, with their bindings and low-grade paper, make a tough sell for recycling plants, and many areas lack substantive recycling options.

I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking phone book fort.

Republic Services has announced that the firm will, as allowed under the Security and Exchange Commission’s new “Notice and Access Rule,” make proxy materials available to shareholders online. Instead of mailing the materials to shareholders, the company will send its stockholders a “Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials.” Republic will be required to send a hard copy set of the materials to any shareholder who requests one.

“At Republic Services Inc., ‘eco’ stands for both ecology, as in the enviroment, and economy, as in the financial bottom line,” said Tod Holmes, senior vice president and chief financial officer of the company. “By using the electronic financial filings, Republic will reduce our hard-copy printing of proxy materials by 75 percent, from 36,000 copies to approximately 9,000 copies reducing paper and printing costs.” The firm estimates it will save about 3 million pieces of paper a year.

The non-profit organization American Forests estimates that eliminating the mailing of 300 million proxy material packages would save 800,000 trees each year from being cut down, reduce fossil fuel consumption by about 500,000 gallons annually by eliminating the need to transport the proxy materials, prevent 100,000 tons of paper from going to the nation’s landfills each year, and eliminate 380,000 tons of greenhouse gases produced in the paper manufacturing process.

The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden is turning to an energy source that it should never run out of: animal dung. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “In about two years, when the plan is fully implemented, the elephant and giraffe houses will be heated, cooled and lit by animal waste converted to energy. At least two other zoos - Denver and Dallas - are in the beginning stages of similar projects.” Zoo officials benefits of the program will include significantly reduced energy expenses and increased landfill diversion.

Duke Energy and the Ohio Department of Development currently are conducting a feasibility study to see how much energy can be produced from the waste, the paper says. Results are due in the spring.

“We have four elephants weighing more than 37,000 pounds, and they produce 800 pounds of waste a day,” Mark Fisher, senior director of facilities and planning for the zoo, told the Enquirer. “That’s at least 20 kw (kilowatts) and enough to heat the elephant house and maybe giraffe house, too (on a daily basis). Right now, we pay Rumpke to haul the waste away, so there’s another savings and another plus because we’re diverting it from a landfill.”

As facilities and communities strive to increase landfill diversion, animal waste, believe it or not, could very well become a diversion target. About two years ago, I wrote about a similar program launched by San Francisco and Norcal Waste Systems.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took time out on Wednesday from considering a presidential run to sign a bill that requires large stores to offer plastic bag recycling programs. According to Reuters, the law “requires all stores that occupy at least 5,000 square feet to implement bag recycling programs as well as make recycled bags available.”

Be sure and check out the Tip Off section in the February issue of Waste Age for Associate Editor Chris Carlson’s story on this new law.