Yesterday, NPR’s All Things Considered featured a remarkable story about Tijuana, Mexico resident Miroslava Enciso Limon, who after visiting one of the city’s notorious dumps at age 17 and seeing the families who lived there, dedicated herself to improving the way trash was handled in the city. After obtaining a degree in industrial engineering, she designed a machine to sort waste and recycling, convinced the city’s leaders to adopt it, and hired the dump’s former residents as employees. Well worth a listen.

Last week, Discovery Networks launched Planet Green, a new channel devoted to “eco-tainment.” If this sounds like a crass commodification of environmental concern … well … it is.

Early returns have not been kind. Troy Patterson, television critic for Slate, offers a particularly harsh review, saying the network “embarrasses the Earth.” Ouch.

Do we really need a 24/7 network peopled with Hollywood spokesmodels telling us to us to recycle, ride a bike and (for the 847th time) adopt compact fluorescent light bulbs? Don’t we risk reducing common sense admonitions to white noise?

I’m of mixed opinion. On one hand, it seems like this brand of glib environmentalism is just asking for a backlash. On the other hand, there is a place for a channel focused on genuine environmental awareness. And Planet Green certainly wouldn’t be the first channel to launch with a questionable focus. Here’s hoping the channel eventually finds its footing and that we eventually get more “eco” and less “tainment.”

Garbage blogging, a trend we have reported on before, continues to gain momentum. Witness this Fiji Times report on Oakland, Calif. resident Beth Terry, who takes a photo of the carefully organized plastic she’s used or come across each week and posts it on her blog, “Fake Plastic Fish.”

Terry’s blog stood out for two reasons: 1) She’s managed to maintain her garbage watch consistently for an entire year, and 2) While other garbage bloggers I’ve seen approach the endeavor almost as anthropologists, with curiosity, Terry’s blog is borderline confessional. She’s determined to rid the world of plastic, and uses the blog as a forum to publicize her weekly transgressions.

How many of us could stand up to the same scrutiny?

Be sure to check out our new collection of waste-related links here. You can reach them anytime by clicking on the “Links” button at the bottom left of the Waste Industry Site homepage. There you’ll find a broad range of relevant links broken down by category, including everything from industry associations to waste-related amusements. We will be updating the database frequently, and will highlight a different link each month.

If you would like to suggest a link to add to our collection, please e-mail Steven Averett.

Summer may be here, but that doesn’t mean you can completely relax. In fact, the industry’s two most prominent associations are asking for a little help from those in the solid waste industry.

The Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) is urging industry members to support the extension of federal tax credits and the Clean Renewable Energy Bonds Program for landfill gas-to-energy and waste-to-energy facilities. The tax credits and the bond program are set to expire at the end of the year.

To compose an e-mail or letter to send to your congressman, visit SWANA’s Action Center by clicking here.

Also, the National Solid Wastes Management Association is urging companies and local governments to share copies of the NSWMA’s “Slow Down to Get Around” ads with local radio and television stations. The ads can be viewed at www.nswma.org.

To receive a broadcast-quality copy of the television or radio ads, contact David Biderman at davidb@envasns.org or (202) 364-3743. To request “Slow Down to Get Around” truck decals, contact Niehaus at sales@niehauscorp.com or (859) 331-3733.

From Time.com comes news that the Isle of Wight in Great Britain will flick the switch this summer on a $16 million, 2.3-megawatt gasification plant. According to the article, the plant, the first of its kind in the United Kingdom, will take in 30,000 tons of trash — or “rubbish,” as the Brits would say — a year to provide electricity for 2,000 households.

Of note from the article: “When it comes to trash, Britain, like much of the world, needs help. Its reputation as a green and pleasant land is at risk from the 16.9 million tons of trash it tossed into landfills last year — that’s more than any other country in the European Union. The Local Government Association recently warned that despite devoting 109 square miles to burial, Britain may run out of landfill space within nine years.”

Also: the Institution of Civil Engineers says that the trash that Britain landfills could provide up to 17 percent of its energy needs.

And finally, to help spread the gasification concept, the plant will feature a visitors’ center. Start planning your vacation now.

The trash industry has long battled a public perception that it is controlled by gangsters. The federal investigation into mob influence among hauling firms in Connecticut and New York state doesn’t help that image.

Earlier this week, James Galante, owner of 25 trash and recycling companies in the area, pleaded guilty to three charges. According to a detailed report in the Hartford Courant, Galante pleaded guilty to racketeering, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and defrauding the Internal Revenue Service; he faces up to 87 months in prison.

According to the Courant, Galante also has agreed to do the following:

* Give up his ownership stakes in his waste companies and not work in the solid waste industry again.

* Pay more than $1.5 million in back taxes to the IRS.

* Forfeit his six racing cars, nearly $450,000 in cash seized two years ago by the feds and a horse farm that he purchased for a former girlfriend.

Federal authorities originally alleged that Galante made quarterly payments to “reputed Genovese crime family boss Matthew ‘Matty the Horse’ Ianniello in exchange for mob muscle to help stifle competition.” However, his plea agreement did not mention the alleged payments, the Courant says.

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.

That’s the question posed in this Reuters article about landfill gas-to-energy projects and other efforts to turn waste into energy. Environmentalists aren’t quite as enthusiastic as the industry about such projects.

In fact, Nathanael Green, director of renewable energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Reuters reporter that promoting the environmental benefits of the projects is like “putting lipstick on a big.”

“This is an environmentally preferable option, but it’s not renewable in the sense that it’s not something we can do forever,” Green adds. “Before we go adding incentives for energy production from garbage, we need to first get the incentives right so that we are maximizing the amount of recycling we do.”