Sad stories like this crop up way too often. A body -- a human being, someone´s parent or sibling or child -- is discovered at a landfill, or at a recycling plant, or inside a garbage truck.

 

Usually the victim is identified as a homeless person, or someone who for one reason or another had decided to catch a few winks inside a trash bin. A collection truck had come along on its route and emptied the bin before the sleeper could wake up and scramble out, and, well ... there´s little more to be said, except that it has to be a horrific way to go, and your heart goes out to the victim.

 

Or victims. In this case the story involves a married couple. Their bodies were found at two paper recycling plants a thousand miles apart, one in St. Louis, the other in Arizona.

 

Doesn´t this type of accident make you wonder, as it does me, if there aren´t some unexplored avenues or underemployed measures that might be put into effect in an effort to reduce the frequency of such occurrences?

 

If anyone has any ideas or comments on this subject, please send them my way. Time and space permitting, I´ll include the best of them in a future column.

 

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

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