The Duluth News Tribune reports that the grousing has reached such a pitch that Wisconsin lawmakers are now considering jacking up the state´s landfill tipping fee from $3 to $10 per ton to slow the trash influx.

The waste industry opposes the proposal. No surprise there: A number of companies have big money invested in landfill expansions in Wisconsin, so they need to take in a lot of waste to recoup those investments. And it matters little to them where the trash comes from.

The article says some key Wisconsin lawmakers oppose the fee increase too, and the bill is a long shot to pass this year. We´ll keep an eye on this one anyway.

U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman has been beating the pavement to win support for the Bush administration´s proposal to resurrect the nation´s spent-nuclear-fuel recycling program. Reuters reports that Bodman, speaking at a nuclear energy conference in Washington yesterday, argued that the plan would hamper terrorist recruitment in poor nations because it would provide those countries with cheaper electricity, thereby boosting their economies.

That´s an interesting tack. Opponents of the nuke-reprocessing proposal have long contended, among other things, that it would make it easier for terrorists to get their hands on plutonium to build nuclear bombs.

I was dimly aware that this nuclear fuel recycling issue has a long history of back-and-forth, but I didn´t know much about the specifics. Thus I was glad to see this summation at the end of the Reuters article: "President Jimmy Carter banned reprocessing because of concerns it could spread nuclear weapons. President Ronald Reagan lifted the ban, and President Bill Clinton reinstated it."

Quick, Robin, run that data through the Bat Computer. I think there may be a pattern there.

I´ve long been a sucker for stories about our culture´s effect on newcomers, especially from an environmental angle. Here´s an interesting account along those lines from a Vietnamese immigrant in San Francisco, courtesy of the Pacific News Service.

I know this is a hoary old cliché, but my parents, probably like many of yours, used to beg me to eat my vegetables because "there are starving children over in [Africa/India/Southeast Asia ...] who would kill for a plate of that." The connection always eluded me, though I don´t think I ever tried very hard to grasp it. I tended to reply with something brilliant like, "Well, then, why don´t we get this into a box and get it over there."

Funny what a few decades can do to one´s perspective. The connection is quite a bit clearer now.

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