Rubbish

Too often, beautifying the inside of your home involves trashing the outside. Almost anyone who has had builders through has stories to tell of paint crews leaving a trail of single-bladed razors in the garden, used to clean up paint overlap on window panes. The weeks spent digging out the new vegetable plot, then the years spent religiously improving it with manure and mulch can be wrecked in a trice when a painter decides to clean his brushes in the yard, using your garden hose.

Edward Humes is a man of eclectic storytelling tastes. A former journalist awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for a series of stories he wrote for the Orange County Register on the military establishment in Southern California, Humes has written 11 nonfiction books on subjects including how the GI Bill transformed the American Dream, Southern justice and the Dixie Mafia, and the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles County. His latest book, "Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash" (Avery: 278 pp., $27)

Something is rotting in the state of Denmark. Lots of things, actually, and it's a bit of an embarrassment for this Scandinavian nation as it prepares to host a widely anticipated global environmental summit this week. Denmark is proud of its image as one of the greenest countries in the world; it's probably why it was chosen as the site of the 15th United Nations Conference on Climate Change. But beneath the gloss lurk some inconvenient truths, including the fact that, pound for pound, Denmark produces more trash per capita than any other country in the 27-member European Union.

When a city crashes to the ground, how do you dispose of it? Six weeks after an earthquake reduced Port-au-Prince to the ruins of a lost war, Haitian and foreign officials who hope to build a new capital first have to confront the wreckage of the old one. The capital is a panorama of rubble: collapsed and half-fallen stores, banks, apartment buildings and homes, hillsides covered by broken shacks that fell like dominoes. Gnarled steel rebar lies all over in massive tangles, like a thousand Medusas.

California no longer allows dumping of discarded televisions and computer monitors in landfills because most contain lead and other toxic materials, making them hazardous. There is no state or national program for disposing of electronic waste, so residents looking to get rid of a monitor or television should notify their city governments or local waste haulers. Most cities have periodic hazardous-waste collection events in which they take large trash bins to neighborhoods.

Officials decided Wednesday to spend $82 million so Los Angeles County's trash can be hauled away by rail and dumped in the desert. The board of directors of the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County signed agreements to purchase the Mesquite Regional Landfill in the back country of Imperial County and the Eagle Mountain Landfill in a remote area of Riverside County for $41 million apiece.

Neighbors who were awarded more than $114,000 in a court judgment stemming from a dispute over a Huntington Beach woman's allegedly trash-infested property sued her again this week, contending that she is trying to duck payment. In the latest chapter of the long-running feud in the upscale Huntington Harbour neighborhood, the plaintiffs contend that Elena Zagustin has tried to avoid paying the November, 1994, judgment by transferring her property to a living trust.

A Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief vowed Monday to crack down on those who illegally dump refuse on public streets and alleys in South Los Angeles. Deputy Chief Kenneth O. Garner, who oversees the department's South Bureau, said that his officers would be launching a task force later this month with investigators from the city's Public Works Department.

Ladders. Wood chippers. Trash cans. Tool boxes. Refrigerators. Chrome tubes. Sounds like the inventory for Sanford and Son's salvage yard, right? Actually, these are just a few examples of the kind of stuff that is routinely if inadvertently dumped on California freeways, causing traffic tie-ups and commuter headaches.

Tina Cassar spent last week watching rain flood her backyard and overflow from her pool. So when the sun came out Sunday morning, the Los Alamitos resident took her family for brunch and a stroll along Seal Beach. There they encountered a stretch of sand littered with mangled shopping carts, bicycle tires, tennis shoes and thousands of plastic cups and bottles. "It's awful," Cassar, 37, said as she walked along the shore. "It just shows what kind of pollution comes through the river system."

David de Rothschild is talking trash, lots and lots of trash. "There were 25 billion Styrofoam cups used last year. How do you even get your head around what 25 billion Styrofoam cups looks like?" he said. "Eighty-odd percent of what's purchased by Americans is thrown out within six months." On this day, though, the British banking heir is focused on some very particular refuse as he skims along the San Francisco Bay in a catamaran called Plastiki: The 12,000 or so recycled soda bottles lashed together to build his clunky vessel, and the growing heap of plastic fragments called the Eastern Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific.

In a chaotic eight-hour budget hearing Wednesday, members of the Los Angeles City Council set aside a slew of budget proposals designed to prevent the city from going bankrupt. But they did approve a reduction to one subsidy program that covers the trash fees of at least 58,395 low-income senior citizens and disabled residents in Los Angeles. Most Los Angeles customers who live in single-family homes pay $36.32 per month in trash and recycling fees, while apartment dwellers pay $24.33, according to city officials.

Tina Cassar spent last week watching rain flood her backyard and overflow from her pool. So when the sun came out Sunday morning, the Los Alamitos resident took her family for brunch and a stroll along Seal Beach. There they encountered a stretch of sand littered with mangled shopping carts, bicycle tires, tennis shoes and thousands of plastic cups and bottles. "It's awful," Cassar, 37, said as she walked along the shore. "It just shows what kind of pollution comes through the river system."

There's an unexpected beauty to this pile of junk as a troupe of heavy equipment performs its daily dance. Dump trucks cough up their contents and glide away. Bulldozers swoop in from behind, and piles of lumber, cardboard, plastic and half-eaten food roll off their blades like sets of ocean waves. The noise at the Puente Hills Landfill, one of the nation's largest garbage heaps, is unrelenting. The air is slightly sweet with decay. The ground pulses like an earthquake. Big Mike wades into the mess.

Regional water quality officials on Thursday put some teeth into their long campaign to cleanse the Los Angeles River system of the tons of trash that turn it into a movable landfill after major storms. Standards previously adopted by the Los Angeles Water Quality Control Board give cities along the watershed until 2016 to keep all trash out of their storm drains. On Thursday, the board incorporated those limits into storm water permits, putting municipalities that don't meet the requirements in violation of the federal Clean Water Act. Until now there had been no penalty for noncompliance.

Something is rotting in the state of Denmark. Lots of things, actually, and it's a bit of an embarrassment for this Scandinavian nation as it prepares to host a widely anticipated global environmental summit this week. Denmark is proud of its image as one of the greenest countries in the world; it's probably why it was chosen as the site of the 15th United Nations Conference on Climate Change. But beneath the gloss lurk some inconvenient truths, including the fact that, pound for pound, Denmark produces more trash per capita than any other country in the 27-member European Union.

David de Rothschild is talking trash, lots and lots of trash. "There were 25 billion Styrofoam cups used last year. How do you even get your head around what 25 billion Styrofoam cups looks like?" he said. "Eighty-odd percent of what's purchased by Americans is thrown out within six months." On this day, though, the British banking heir is focused on some very particular refuse as he skims along the San Francisco Bay in a catamaran called Plastiki: The 12,000 or so recycled soda bottles lashed together to build his clunky vessel, and the growing heap of plastic fragments called the Eastern Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific.

In case you wondered, there were 43,167 fast-food containers lying on Orange County beaches in the fall of 1998. And 1,003 diapers. But the first comprehensive study of beach trash in Orange County found that the most common debris is neither those items, nor cigarette butts, nor paper wrappers, but tiny plastic pellets.

It can be hard to find what you're looking for in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But scientists on an August research cruise had no problem tracking down their subject. "We did observe a lot of plastic out there in the ocean about 1,000 miles from anything," said Miriam Goldstein, chief scientist on the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition. "It's pretty shocking." A group of doctoral students and research volunteers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and Project Kaisei spent nearly three weeks on the research vessel New Horizon taking samples and exploring the plastic garbage patch floating in the North Pacific.

They didn't hold up to the bears of Alaska, but they just might be enough to discourage the scavengers of Santa Ana. Fed up with urban foragers who root through neighborhood trash in search of plastic and aluminum, residents of one Santa Ana neighborhood are locking up their recyclables in a container designed to withstand the brute strength and cunning of brown and black bears. So it is that Paula Faccou now keeps a key -- right on the same chain with her house key -- to lock up her trash.