"This was state of the art in the 1970s. Then it started leaking."

"This was state of the art in the 1970s. Then it started leaking."

Anyone who wonders how well all the buried landfill liners out there across North America will hold up as the decades seep by may be forgiven for finding the foregoing quotation disconcerting. It comes from an article that appeared Tuesday in the La Crosse Tribune, and it pertains to a landfill in La Crosse, Wis., that county officials are having dug up and moved to a new site for the dual purpose of halting groundwater contamination and extending the landfill´s life by several decades.

One has to assume that landfill liner technology is advancing, that with each passing year the liners are being made more long-lasting and reliable to prevent toxic runoff from leaking into groundwater. Or maybe hope would be a better operative word to use.

Speaking of runoff, that (plus hiding) is what some members of the media may be thinking about doing, since, as this next link shows, we can now add the Great Toxic Stew Theory to the list of exaggerations that the media overreported in the hyperventilatory aftermath of Katrina´s big Gulf Coast smackdown last month.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that a Louisiana State University research team has concluded that the yicky brown soup that swamped New Orleans after the storm hit was not unusually toxic and was instead "typical of stormwater runoff in the region."

New York City plans to reduce its sanitation work force by 200 and give a 17.5% pay raise to the remaining 6,000-plus workers as part of what the Bloomberg administration is touting as a landmark deal to boost worker productivity.

The plan´s centerpiece is the introduction of one-man trash trucks that will "pick up large, metal ´roll-on, roll-off´ garbage boxes and take them to the dump," the New York Times reports.

The city of Jacksonville, Fla., may want to consider following the Big Apple´s lead in implementing the one-man truck concept. News4Jax.com reports that a city trash collector has been charged with aggravated battery after whacking a co-worker with a fence pole during a dispute over who should drive the truck.

"According to his arrest report, Kevin Brinkley, 45, and another worker were taking turns driving and picking up yard waste in north Jacksonville when the other man, Willie Jackson, 39, asked Brinkley to take a turn at the wheel. Police said Brinkley grabbed a 3-feet-long wooden pole from inside the cab and struck the co-worker four or five times.

"Brinkley told officers that the co-worker threatened to shoot him, then got in his face."

Whereupon, I gather -- just filling in some blanks here -- the pole got in Jackson´s face. Or somewhere on his person.

The article doesn´t address why the pole was in the cab. I´d wager it was put there for use as a peacekeeper. If so, that´s another policy that city officials may want to cogitate on a bit. Just a suggestion.

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.