Waste Management
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40 free Waste Management trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Everything we throw away has to go somewhere, and where it goes is one of the oldest problems of city life. Ancient drains, Victorian sewers, the first incinerators and the modern engineered landfill were all answers to the same question, and each left good stories behind. This quiz covers the working ideas of waste management, such as the waste hierarchy, landfill gas, composting, recycling symbols and hazardous materials, alongside the history, the disasters that changed the law and the places that handle rubbish in unusual ways. A few questions come from film and television. It suits students of environmental science, people revising for a site or workplace waste course, quiz hosts planning an environment round, and anyone curious about what happens after the rubbish truck drives away.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which HBO crime drama's lead character tells his psychiatrist that he works as a waste management consultant?
The Sopranos
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.
Q 02Monte Testaccio, an artificial hill 35 metres high beside the Tiber, is made almost entirely of broken ancient what?
Olive oil jars
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.
Q 03A 2014 radiation leak at New Mexico's underground nuclear waste store was traced to a drum packed with the wrong what?
Cat litter
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.
Q 04What 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
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.
Q 05By weight, nearly half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was found in a 2018 study to consist of what?
Fishing nets
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.
Q 06Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 while visiting which city to support striking sanitation workers?
Memphis
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.
Q 07What name is given to a rock-like sewer blockage of grease and wet wipes, like the 130-tonne one under Whitechapel?
Fatberg
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.
Q 08Seine prefect Eugène Poubelle's 1884 decree for Paris landlords made his surname the everyday French word for what?
Dustbin
Dustbin became la poubelle after he ordered building owners to give their residents three covered containers, each holding between 40 and 120 litres.
Q 09Which item, of which an estimated 4.5 trillion are dropped each year, is the world's most littered man-made object?
Cigarette butts
Cigarette butts are more than paper and ash: their filters are usually made from cellulose acetate, a plastic fibre.
Q 10Which acronym, used in the hazardous waste industry by 1980, labels locals who fight a landfill planned near them?
NIMBY
NIMBY, short for not in my back yard, first appeared in print in February 1979 in the Daily Press, a Virginia newspaper.
Q 11Which animated film follows a lone robot compacting rubbish on a planet humans abandoned 700 years earlier?
WALL-E
WALL-E has just one companion in his work, a cockroach the filmmakers named Hal after the silent film producer Hal Roach.
Q 12Which flammable gas, about half of what rotting landfill rubbish gives off, is burned at some sites for power?
Methane
Methane forms when bacteria break down buried rubbish without oxygen, a process that gets going about six months after the material is tipped.
Q 13What name is given to the polluted liquid that drains out of a landfill and also forms at rainy composting sites?
Leachate
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.
Q 21The Zabbaleen, who collect rubbish door to door and recycle up to 80% of it, work in which capital city?
Cairo
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.
Q 22The Cloaca Maxima, one of the world's earliest sewage systems, was built to drain marshes in which ancient city?
Rome
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.
Q 23What name was given to Victorian London's sewer scavengers, the trade of the hero in Terry Pratchett's novel Dodger?
Toshers
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.
Q 14In the five-step waste hierarchy written into European Union law in 2008, which option ranks as the most preferred?
Prevention
Prevention ranks first because rubbish that is never created needs no handling; reuse, recycling, recovery and safe disposal follow in that order.
Q 15Which metal can be recycled endlessly using about 5% of the energy needed to make it new from bauxite ore?
Aluminium
Aluminium is so worth recovering that around 75% of all the metal ever manufactured is still in use today.
Q 16In a compost heap, 'green' waste such as grass clippings and food scraps mainly supplies which element?
Nitrogen
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.
Q 17CopenHill, a Copenhagen power plant that burns rubbish, was designed by Bjarke Ingels with what on its roof?
A ski slope
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.
Q 18Minamata disease, discovered in Japan in 1956, was caused by factory wastewater carrying which toxic element?
Mercury
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.
Q 19Which building material, once common in insulation and roofing, must go to licensed hazardous waste sites?
Asbestos
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.
Q 20Which Niagara Falls neighbourhood, built beside a buried chemical dump, led to the US Superfund clean-up law of 1980?
Love Canal
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.
Q 24Britain's first rubbish incinerators, built in Nottingham in 1874 to Alfred Fryer's design, were known by what name?
Destructors
Destructors soon met opposition from their neighbours, because the plants produced large amounts of ash that wafted over the surrounding area.
Q 25The plastic rubbish bag was invented in 1950 by Harry Wasylyk, Larry Hansen and Frank Plomp, all from which country?
Canada
Canada ranked the green rubbish bag 36th among its 50 greatest inventions in a CBC Television special.
Q 26Architect John W. Hammes of Racine, Wisconsin, is credited with building which kitchen appliance in 1927?
Waste disposal unit
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.
Q 27Iron Eyes Cody, who shed a tear as a Native American in a 1971 anti-pollution advert, was actually of what ancestry?
Italian
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.
Q 28What name is given to the study of a society through its rubbish, pioneered by William Rathje in Tucson in 1973?
Garbology
Garbology overturned assumptions about landfills: Rathje's team found that buried rubbish biodegrades much more slowly than had been projected.
Q 29Where do refuse trucks play Beethoven's Für Elise to tell residents that it is time to bring out their rubbish?
Taiwan
Taiwan's trucks also play a piano piece called Maiden's Prayer, switch to Christmas music in December, and sometimes broadcast short English lessons.
Q 30Semakau, an offshore landfill filled mainly with incinerator ash brought by covered barge, serves which island nation?
Singapore
Singapore burns its rubbish before burying what is left, and silt screens were installed during construction so the nearby corals were not affected.