A Trashed Economy Foretold; Intake at Landfills Has Been Falling
Along with the stock market and the foreclosure rate, a less-heralded barometer has signaled the arrival of hard times: the landfill.</br></br>In an extravagantly wasteful society that typically puts 254 million tons of unwanted stuff at the curb to be thrown away each year, landfill managers say they knew something was amiss in the economy when they saw trash levels start steadily dropping last year. Now, some are reporting declines as sharp as 30 percent.</br></br>"The trash man is the first one to know about a recession because we see it first," said Richard S. Weber, manager of the Loudoun County landfill. "Circuit City's closing, so people aren't going there and buying those big boxes of stuff and throwing away all that Styrofoam and shrink-wrap . . . and whatever they were replacing."</br></br>Trash volume has dropped so much, Weber said, that instead of running out of space in 2012, as had been projected, the Loudoun landfill will gain a year and a half or so of use. "That's huge," he said.</br></br>In Prince William County, which has been particularly hard hit with foreclosures, the amount of discarded refrigerators, washers, dryers and other appliances that are usually sent to the landfill has fallen by 20 percent since the recession started. "People aren't buying new," said Tom Smith, solid waste program manager. "They're making do with what they have."