South Jersey Solid Waste
Current estimates are that each person in the United States produces about 4.9 pounds of solid waste each day, a figure that has been rising. This is generally what gets hauled away from homes by garbage or recycling trucks; there’s more produced by industry. Getting rid of it is a major and growing problem; when the truck pulls away from your house, the garbage does not go out of existence.
In the first phase of exploring the subject, Jim wrote a review of Burlington County NJ’s landfill and recycling programs. This involved extensive research and visits to the county’s central landfill and recycling facilities. Programs are large, expensive, complicated, and largely out of people’s thoughts, but they are real.
This led to a formal research article, published in the Stockton University’s Autumn 2024 edition of SoJourn, the journal of history, culture and geography of South Jersey. A copy may be viewed here.
A companion article by Jim in the same edition examines the history and mysteries of the Tuckerton Mound, a massive pile of clam shells on the salt marshes south of Tuckerton, NJ, off of Great Bay Boulevard (Seven Bridges Road), created by early indigenous visitors over a period of centuries dating back at least 1500 years ago. The pile is about 100 feet long, 50 wide and 10 high, with a few hardy trees now growing on the thin layer of soil that accumulated on it. Long a subject of study by archaeologists, it represents one of New Jersey’s oldest remaining “garbage dumps.”
