Several earlier stories have reported on the challenges Waste Management is up against, mainly having to do with the crazy-quilt routing system the company inherited from the Army Corps and the fluidity and unpredictability of repopulation patterns as hurricane evacuees return to the city.

In the most recent story from the New Orleans Times-Picayune about the City Council´s lashing of WM last week, spokesman Rene Faucheux defended his company´s performance, saying the city officials based their criticism on information gathered two to three weeks ago and that collections have improved since WM started using a new route schedule March 13. Since then, he said, complaints have dropped by 85%.

According to this Newsday report, U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, argued that several other U.S. cities have installed bomb-resistant bins in their transit stations in an effort to minimize the potential damage from attacks like the one in Madrid in 2004 that resulted in almost 200 deaths.

A New York City Transit spokesman defended the agency´s decision, saying city officials started looking at bomb-resistant bins years ago, before the Homeland Security Department issued its directive, and determined that the available containers concentrate the blast force upward, which wouldn´t work in New York´s subway system because of its low ceilings and mezzanines located directly above platforms.

The Los Angeles Times reports that a study recently published by researchers from the University of Southern California is likely to result in a major increase in the estimated number of deaths caused by breathing sooty smog in California.

How major? State officials are contemplating doubling or even tripling their previous estimates of the mortality risk Californians face from lung cancer, heart attacks, and other serious illnesses linked to everyday exposure to airborne soot and smog.

The Richmond [Va.] Times-Dispatch reports that out-of-state trash disposed of in Virginia jumped 18% from 2003 to 2004. Virginia has for years ranked No. 2 among waste-importing states behind Pennsylvania, but the gap is shrinking fast.

The article also says 75% of the imported waste comes in on trucks and the rest by train, and that Waste Management Inc. has a plan in the works to import waste by barge up the James River to a port in Charles City, "but the company has not said when it plans to start."

Something tells me Virginians will be learning a good deal more about that waste-by-barge plan (and others like it) soon. I hear there´s a little town a couple hundred miles up the coast that´s talking about putting some of its trash on boats and sending it their way.

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