Tip and Run: Australians chuck out more rubbisn than nearly anyone else on earth. What happens to it all?

摘要

THERE'S A PLACE on Sydney's southern edge where you can get a sublime vista across 60 km of city, from Sutherland all the way to Chatswood, in the north, and beyond. To enjoy this view to the full, you must stand on a plateau formed by a layer of garbage 45 m deep. Not that you notice anything unpleasant. The 100 ha plateau, at the Lucas Heights Waste Management Centre, is being rehabilitated and new grass is sprouting through the cover of mud and mulch. When I visited it, I was moved by the notion that the material beneath me, having come from thousands of homes, had once been intimately entwined with the lives of the people whose city spread away to the north. Projecting myself into the future, I felt with a kind of premature nostalgia that I wasstanding on the remains of a civilisation that had doomed itself to extinction by its wastefulness.