Feh! What a load of ...

... Sludge. Loads of sewage sludge are raising plenty of hackles out in Southern California. The L.A. Times reports that voters in Kern County, the city´s rural neighbor to the north, are fixing to put the kibosh on L.A.´s practice of transporting treated sewage sludge to farmland there.

So L.A. Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa is faced with a dilemma. He´ll either have to undertake a costly campaign to change Kern County voters´ minds, or else come up with millions of dollars to fund an alternative plan to truck the muck to Arizona. Yuck.

And more yuck: Detroit, like Cleveland where I live, experienced heavy snowfall through most of December. Since Christmas, though, our part of the country has been warm and rainy, and this past week, the ground -- such as it is, brown and mucky -- has shown up to say hello for the first time in a month.

In downtown Detroit that´s a big bother because, as this Detroit News editorial frets, the thaw uncovered a whole lotta ugly in the form of cheeseburger wrappers and such, and the town is scheduled to host a big pigskin to-do next month. Something called the "Super Bowl." Perhaps you´ve heard of it?

In any event, the newspaper´s editors appear to have come up with a novel, go-get-´em approach to solving the city´s litter problem. They´re hoping for more snow.

Let´s close  today with an item from our Why-Didn´t-Anyone-Think-Of-This-Sooner Department. At the behest of New York City Zero Waste Campaign chief Timothy Logan, solid waste consultant Gary Liss has compiled a list -- The Liss List? -- of communities that have adopted zero-waste goals or developed plans to achieve such a goal.

Zero waste: Whenever I see that term, I get disturbing flashbacks of Gomer Pyle, I mean Jim Nabors, on his TV musical variety show circa 1970 booming out, in his baritone profundo, a song called "The Impossible Dream": This is my quest/To follow that star/No matter how hopeless/No matter how far ...

If history teaches us anything, it´s that important changes usually start with a small group of hard-headed eccentrics hatching an impossible dream.

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