Denver officials say the convenience of single-stream has fueled a big jump in participation, and the huge demand for material overseas, particularly in China, has been an important contributing factor as well.

Continuing today's tour of environmental news from cities that are both [A] being swept along on tides of one type or another and [B] hosting NFL conference championship games next Sunday, Seattle finds itself awash in a monsoon of historic proportions, even by that city's legendarily wet-and-gloomy standards. Twenty-seven straight days it has rained in the Emerald City, and the inundation is starting to heighten officials' concerns about pollution in lakes and streams from urban runoff, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.

We just pray [prey?] that the area's celebrated indigenous seahawk population survives the deluge.

Concluding today's tour of mythological bird species in peril, here's the latest from Inbox's Chicken Little Department. It's a preview of a global-warming doomsday prognosis, a book titled "The Revenue of Gaia" written by British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock. The book is scheduled to be unleashed on our unsuspecting planet Feb. 2.

I'm tempted to trawl for some cheap, easy laughs here, drawing allusions to Henny Penny, Turkey Lurky and the rest of the crew. But I'll refrain, since, truth be told, I'm not 100 percent opposed to views like Lovelock's. Ninety percent, maybe, but not 100.

Proclamations like this strike me as too extreme for their own good. But on the other side of that same coin, those who assert that global warming doesn't exist are, I think, being every bit as extreme -- and compounding the offense by erring on the side of recklessless.

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