40 Fun Facts About Waste Management

Which HBO crime drama's lead character tells his psychiatrist that he works as a waste management consultant?

The Sopranos gives Tony the cover story in its very first episode, though Dr. Melfi hints straight away that she knows what he really does.

Monte Testaccio, an artificial hill 35 metres high beside the Tiber, is made almost entirely of broken ancient what?

Olive oil jars were smashed and stacked here once emptied, perhaps 53 million of them, and sprinkled with lime to mask the smell of rancid oil.

A 2014 radiation leak at New Mexico's underground nuclear waste store was traced to a drum packed with the wrong what?

Cat litter of an organic kind was used by contractors at Los Alamos instead of the usual clay type, and the barrel burst open underground on Valentine's Day.

What name was given to London's hot summer of 1858, when untreated sewage on the banks of the Thames fouled the air?

The Great Stink grew so bad that Parliament's riverside curtains were soaked in lime chloride, and MPs soon backed Joseph Bazalgette's new sewer network.

By weight, nearly half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was found in a 2018 study to consist of what?

Fishing nets made of synthetic fibre accounted for almost half the mass, largely because Pacific currents gather up the gear that fleets lose or abandon.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 while visiting which city to support striking sanitation workers?

Memphis sanitation workers walked out after two colleagues, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in a compactor while sheltering from the rain.

What name is given to a rock-like sewer blockage of grease and wet wipes, like the 130-tonne one under Whitechapel?

Fatberg pieces cut from the Whitechapel find, which stretched more than 250 metres, were dried for several weeks and put on display at the Museum of London.

Seine prefect Eugène Poubelle's 1884 decree for Paris landlords made his surname the everyday French word for what?

Dustbin became la poubelle after he ordered building owners to give their residents three covered containers, each holding between 40 and 120 litres.

Which item, of which an estimated 4.5 trillion are dropped each year, is the world's most littered man-made object?

Cigarette butts are more than paper and ash: their filters are usually made from cellulose acetate, a plastic fibre.

Which acronym, used in the hazardous waste industry by 1980, labels locals who fight a landfill planned near them?

NIMBY, short for not in my back yard, first appeared in print in February 1979 in the Daily Press, a Virginia newspaper.

Which animated film follows a lone robot compacting rubbish on a planet humans abandoned 700 years earlier?

WALL-E has just one companion in his work, a cockroach the filmmakers named Hal after the silent film producer Hal Roach.

Which flammable gas, about half of what rotting landfill rubbish gives off, is burned at some sites for power?

Methane forms when bacteria break down buried rubbish without oxygen, a process that gets going about six months after the material is tipped.

What name is given to the polluted liquid that drains out of a landfill and also forms at rainy composting sites?

Leachate picks up dissolved and suspended material from everything it trickles through, which is why it is far dirtier than the rain that began it.

In the five-step waste hierarchy written into European Union law in 2008, which option ranks as the most preferred?

Prevention ranks first because rubbish that is never created needs no handling; reuse, recycling, recovery and safe disposal follow in that order.

Which metal can be recycled endlessly using about 5% of the energy needed to make it new from bauxite ore?

Aluminium is so worth recovering that around 75% of all the metal ever manufactured is still in use today.

In a compost heap, 'green' waste such as grass clippings and food scraps mainly supplies which element?

Nitrogen lets the heap's microbes grow and multiply, and composting works best with about 25 parts of carbon from woody 'brown' waste to each part of it.

CopenHill, a Copenhagen power plant that burns rubbish, was designed by Bjarke Ingels with what on its roof?

A ski slope open all year runs down the 85-metre building, which also carries a hiking trail and a climbing wall up its full height.

Minamata disease, discovered in Japan in 1956, was caused by factory wastewater carrying which toxic element?

Mercury from the Chisso chemical plant built up in the bay's fish and shellfish, and the effect on local cats was so severe it was named dancing cat fever.

Which building material, once common in insulation and roofing, must go to licensed hazardous waste sites?

Asbestos sheds fibres that can cause the cancer mesothelioma when breathed in, so stripped material is wrapped in two layers of plastic before it travels.

Which Niagara Falls neighbourhood, built beside a buried chemical dump, led to the US Superfund clean-up law of 1980?

Love Canal's land was sold to the local school district for $1 in 1953 by Hooker Chemical, which had dumped nearly 20,000 tonnes of by-products in it.

The Zabbaleen, who collect rubbish door to door and recycle up to 80% of it, work in which capital city?

Cairo's streets visibly filled with rotting food in 2009 after the government culled the pigs that eat the organic scraps the Zabbaleen sort out.

The Cloaca Maxima, one of the world's earliest sewage systems, was built to drain marshes in which ancient city?

Rome's great drain, begun by tradition around 600 BC, was described by Pliny the Elder as large enough for a wagon loaded with hay to pass through.

What name was given to Victorian London's sewer scavengers, the trade of the hero in Terry Pratchett's novel Dodger?

Toshers shared their name with thieves: the word was also used for those who stripped valuable copper from the hulls of ships moored along the Thames.

Britain's first rubbish incinerators, built in Nottingham in 1874 to Alfred Fryer's design, were known by what name?

Destructors soon met opposition from their neighbours, because the plants produced large amounts of ash that wafted over the surrounding area.

The plastic rubbish bag was invented in 1950 by Harry Wasylyk, Larry Hansen and Frank Plomp, all from which country?

Canada ranked the green rubbish bag 36th among its 50 greatest inventions in a CBC Television special.

Architect John W. Hammes of Racine, Wisconsin, is credited with building which kitchen appliance in 1927?

Waste disposal unit history is contested: Hammes patented his design in 1935 and founded InSinkErator, yet General Electric launched its own Disposall that same year.

Iron Eyes Cody, who shed a tear as a Native American in a 1971 anti-pollution advert, was actually of what ancestry?

Italian on both sides, he was born in Louisiana to a mother from Sicily and a father from southern Italy, and denied it when his half-sister said so in 1996.

What name is given to the study of a society through its rubbish, pioneered by William Rathje in Tucson in 1973?

Garbology overturned assumptions about landfills: Rathje's team found that buried rubbish biodegrades much more slowly than had been projected.

Where do refuse trucks play Beethoven's Für Elise to tell residents that it is time to bring out their rubbish?

Taiwan's trucks also play a piano piece called Maiden's Prayer, switch to Christmas music in December, and sometimes broadcast short English lessons.

Semakau, an offshore landfill filled mainly with incinerator ash brought by covered barge, serves which island nation?

Singapore burns its rubbish before burying what is left, and silt screens were installed during construction so the nearby corals were not affected.

Onkalo, a repository tunnelled deep into bedrock to hold spent nuclear fuel for the long term, is in which country?

Finland's Onkalo, whose name means cavity, is designed to seal spent fuel in copper capsules, each set in its own hole and packed round with bentonite clay.

Yucca Mountain, chosen by Congress in 1987 as the one site to study for burying nuclear waste, is in which state?

Nevada fought the plan for decades, with Senator Harry Reid leading the opposition, and Congress ended federal funding for the site in 2011.

Which Swiss city gives its name to the 1989 treaty restricting shipments of hazardous waste to poorer countries?

Basel hosted the treaty's adoption after scandals such as the Khian Sea, a ship that dumped 4,000 tons of Philadelphia incinerator ash near Gonaïves in Haiti.

The medals at which Olympic Games were made from metal extracted from small electronic devices donated by the public?

Tokyo 2020 organisers began asking the public for old mobile phones and other electronics in 2017, working with the phone company NTT Docomo.

Which country imposed the first national ban on thin plastic bags in 2002, after discarded bags worsened its floods?

Bangladesh acted after discarded bags were blamed for worsening the floods that put two-thirds of the country under water between 1988 and 1998.

Which US state passed America's first bottle deposit law in 1971, seen at the time mainly as a clean-up measure?

Oregon saw results fast: bottles fell from about 40% of the state's litter in 1971 to roughly 6% by 1979.

A dump fire that began near Knighton in Wales in 1989 still smouldered 15 years later, fed by some ten million what?

Old tyres conduct heat poorly, so a burning heap is hard to cool, keeps burning inside when the outside is put out, and easily reignites.

Agbogbloshie, a district notorious for dismantling and burning scrap electronics, is in which African capital?

Accra's informal scrap trade is highly hierarchical, and the collectors, dismantlers and burners, often young newcomers, sit on its lowest rung.

Plogging, the habit of picking up rubbish while jogging, began as an organised activity around 2016 in which country?

Sweden supplied the name too: plogging blends jogging with the Swedish phrase plocka upp, meaning to pick up.

Which Pennsylvania town sits above a coal fire burning since 1962, usually blamed on a blaze at its landfill?

Centralia's fire burns up to 300 feet down across an eight-mile stretch of old workings, and at its present rate could last more than 250 years.