Talking trash: Indiana has the highest per capita trash in the country. Or do we?

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THOUGH MANY HOOSIERS go to great pains to recycle whenever possible, we're still sending a bunch of garbage to landfills.

How much do we dump in our landfills? More than 4,000 pounds per year for each and every man, woman and child in Indiana. It's 2.1 tons by one national estimate, 2.3 tons per capita if you take the tonnage reported by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management--14,542,880 tons in 2006--and divide it by the estimated 2006 Indiana population of 6,313,520.

Any way you slice the data, these rather embarrassing figures put the Hoosier state at the top of another dubious national ranking, as the state with the highest per-capita landfill dumping. Perhaps it's not surprising ... we have to do something with all of those candy wrappers that helped make us among the nation's most obese. The good news is that our dumping in 2006 was down from 2005, which was our most trash-filled year of the past decade.

But wait--is it really our fault? Are those candy wrappers all ours? It may come as something of a relief to learn that we had some help in generating all of that trash. In fact, according to IDEM, 23 percent of our landfill trash in 2006 came from out-of-state.

For that, we can thank our closest neighbors, especially those across the border in Chicago. It's no accident that the busiest landfill in Indiana is the Newton County Landfill, which in 2006 took in 2.6 million tons of waste. Of that, 1.5 million tons of waste was shipped in from Illinois. The County Line Landfill in Fulton County, meanwhile, took in just over half a million tons of Illinois waste and the Liberty Landfill in White County accepted just over a quarter million tons of trash from Illinois.

In all, Cook County, Illinois, dumped 2.2 million tons of garbage in Indiana in 2006--the Chicago-to-Indiana waste stream has been especially busy since a Cook County landfill closed a few years ago. Of course, it works both ways. Indiana also sends some of its trash across the state line (though not nearly as much as it takes in). One of the prime destinations for our exported trash is Michigan. One other item of note from IDEM--2006 was the first year Indiana imported garbage from Canada, though only 28 tons.

Does all this matter? Consider another statistic from IDEM: If we keep sending waste to Indiana landfills at the rate we did in 2006, we would run out of space in just under 15 years.

But the news isn't all bad. Recycling is one of the answers to the solid waste problem, and it is a big and growing business. One study from a few years ago estimated that there are 1,700 recycling and reuse businesses in Indiana, employing some 75,000 people.

There's also evidence of a slight slowdown in dumping, according to an Indiana landfill operator who asked not to be named. Since about the third quarter of last year, this operator has seen a drop in the volume of trash, for as-yet-undetermined reasons though he speculates that an economic slowdown could be part of the cause.