IN THE 1967 film The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin Braddock, receives a single word of advice about his future from a well-meaning friend of his parents: "Plastics." Our fearless, environment-saving duo of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Environment Minister Peter Garrett were 10 and 14 respectively when the film came out, and it seems plausible that they sucked this message in with their generational DNA but were too young to recognise its satirical intent.

The embarrassing rubbish mountain in Naples subsides

MCD officials today said the engineered sanitary landfill site, which the civic body is developing at Jaitpur, will be ready by December this year.

The Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) has said it is unable to collect garbage from city thoroughfares beginning Sunday because of lack of fuel to run its garbage trucks. Since last three days, the KMC has not sent its vehicles to dump garbage in landfill site in Sisdole and the transfer station in Teku has already filled up. "Due to lack of diesel, we cannot collect and transport the garbage. We cannot resume our task unless fuel is made available,' Rabinman Shrestha, environmental engineer at KMC's Environment Department. The KMC has said it requires 2000 liters of diesel everyday to run its garbage collecting vehicles. nepalnews.com sd Feb 17 08

>> More than 100,000 tonnes of rotting garbage are lying on the roadsides of the southern Italian city of Naples, after garbage trucks stopped operating since the last week of December 2007 because

Residents staying in the vicinity of Deonar and Mulund dumping grounds in Mumbai can breathe easy now as the municipality plans to use deodorant-cum-insect repellents at the grounds. Complaints about