garbage news stories on Newser

Garbage Cam Airs Dirty Trash Habits

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:28:20 CDT

Now on Facebook: Your garbage. Or at least, the garbage of five households who signed up for a Newcastle University program that posts photos of every item dumped in one garbage can on Facebook. Hoping to raise consciousness about recycling efforts, it uses a sensor and a camera phone to...

Big Stink: Great Garbage Patch's Size Exaggerated

Evann Gastaldo — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 07:41:46 CST

The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is often said to be twice the size of Texas—but that and other scary-sounding claims are “grossly exaggerated,” some scientists are now insisting. A new study shows the plastic waste patch is actually 200 times smaller than previously claimed when comparing its mass to...

Upside to NYC's Piles of Trash: Mound Saves Suicidal Man

Kate Schwartz — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 14:46:05 CST

The snow is melting but the piles of trash are growing—and that was very good news for at least one New Yorker. A suicidal man who tried to end his life by jumping from the ninth floor of a building in Midtown today survived because he landed on a...

Indian Tribe Doesn't Want US Trash on Sacred Land

Evann Gastaldo — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:04:00 CDT

Hawaii's landfill space is in such short supply, the state decided to transport thousands of tons of trash 2,600 miles to Washington. Making the journey even more bizarre: The waste would travel over the Yakama Indians' sacred hunting grounds to get to its destination, and the tribe is none...

Old Couple Found Buried Alive in Trash

Mary Papenfuss — Wed, 26 May 2010 04:58:54 CDT

An elderly Chicago couple was found, alive, buried beneath mounds of trash in their two-story home. The neighbors called police after they hadn't spotted the couple, both in their 70s, for days. Responding firefighters in Hazmat suits entered the home to find the couple covered in rotting food and other...

Forget Jonah: This Whale Ate Sweatpants, Surgical Gloves

Kate Schwartz — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 20:00:00 CDT

Like that episode of Seinfeld come to life, biologists found a golf ball in the stomach of a gray whale that died after getting stranded on a West Seattle beach on Wednesday—but it gets sadder from there, reports the AP . Though the scientists say most of the whale's stomach...

Plastic Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic

Evann Gastaldo — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:10:00 CDT

If you’re planning on taking a cruise, hopefully your ship won’t travel through the “great Atlantic garbage patch” that covers thousands of square miles between Bermuda and the Azores islands. The plastic debris is so small that some pieces are almost invisible, and the floating trash heap—pushed together by...

Egypt Kills All Pigs— But Pigs Eat All Trash

Nick McMaster — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:48:09 CDT

When the Egyptian government decided to kill all of Cairo’s pigs last spring in a pre-emptive measure to combat swine flu, they apparently forgot that the pigs performed a vital function in a city with poor public services: eating trash, the New York Times reports. The zabaleen, Cairo’s Christian minority,...

Brown Begins Community Service

Will McCahill — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:10:27 CDT

Singer Chris Brown today began the community labor that’s part of his sentence for beating girlfriend Rihanna, MTV reports, with the singer posting a photo from the work to his Twitter feed. His 6 months of labor will include picking up trash in his native Virginia; Brown, 20, also faces...