The editorial makes some good points, but unless I’m missing something, it doesn’t offer any concrete ideas about how such an expansion of curbside recycling should be funded (as opposed to how it shouldn’t be funded; the piece has plenty to say about that).

Keep Your Sludge To Yourself
The Toronto Star reports that the city of Toronto and Republic Services Inc. are at odds over whether the company is contractually obligated to continue accepting the city’s treated sewage sludge at the Carleton Farms landfill near Detroit. A couple weeks ago Republic informed Toronto that the landfill will stop accepting the mucky stuff Aug. 1.

This latest spat underlines once again the tenuous position Toronto and Ontario have painted themselves into regarding their voluminous daily exportation of solid waste to Michigan.

It’s worth noting that some small cities around Toronto are beginning to see the light and have started making alternative plans to dispose of their solid waste in the remote but still possible event that the Ontario-Michigan trash channel gets shut down altogether. The big city, on the other hand, seems determined to ignore the writing on the wall.

Southern Exposure
Continuing with our waste-crossing-borders theme, humans aren’t the only thing quietly streaming into the U.S. from Mexico these days. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that untold amounts of toxic waste are making the passage as well. (If you have trouble reading the story because a gray box is covering part of it, click the "Print This" link near the top of the page and you’ll get an easier-to-read version.)

"What concerns experts most is that the [EPA] lacks a computerized system to quickly receive and process details about cross-border movements of hazardous waste," the Union-Tribune reports. "The EPA makes do with paper manifests on which truckers list the hazardous waste that they are hauling. Three years ago, the agency abandoned its Haztraks computer database that quantified data taken from those manifests. The EPA had hired a private contractor to do the data entry, and the project was more than two years behind when the program folded in 2003."

Ho hum. Another day, another gaping hole in our nation’s anti-terrorism armor uncovered. Oy, how vulnerable we are.

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