In my town, after the landfill filled up, they built an incinerator. The town dump was turned into a &quot;transfer station&quot; where residents could bring their trash and recyclables. Trash would get &quot;transferred&quot; into trucks and hauled off to the incinerator, where it was converted into ash and electricity. The recyclables which we dutifully sorted into glass, plastics, newspaper, cardboard, metal.. were also hauled off to that same incinerator.<p>As a condition of building the incinerator in the town, the builder granted us a yearly quota of so many tons of garbage we could dump in there for free. Since our garbage was under that quota, they just brought the recycling there too! Why pay for it to be properly processed when we could burn it for free?