ABSTRACT
During the late 1980s and the decade of the 1990s, a heightened awareness and concern arose about the state of the world’s environment. For instance, the media, environmental groups, and politicans both in United States and Europe frequently pointed to a growing solid waste problem. Often evening news programs would show clips illustrating waste disposal problems such as barges loaded with garbage with no place to dispose of their loads and beaches littered with wastes like hypodermic needles, serum bags, garbage, and paper. Also, plastic waste was more frequently being found in water-ways, like the plastic rings used for beverage six-packs, some of it choking and snaring marine life. New York City was for a while dumping its waste in the Atlantic Ocean, but sometimes it shipped it to nearby states for burial. At the time, it seemed that we were running out of landfills. The good news is that out of the numerous solid waste concerns came a groundswell of sentiment to improve product and material recycling.
