Word: compactors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...slight problem with Trust, George V. Higgins' 20th book, is that Earl's task is simple. He pulls off the theft easily; for fairly complicated reasons, the intended victim wants the car to disappear. Unfortunately, Earl ignores the instructions to have the hot auto crushed in a trash compactor. He sells it instead, a characteristic act of greed that promises to get him in trouble. But Higgins seems much more interested in atmosphere than in denouement. There are long, long passages of the author's by now patented low-life banter, characters being long-winded and tedious about the banalities...
Compliance will not be easy. Merchant fleets dump at least 450,000 plastic containers overboard every day. The U.S. Navy, which accounts for four tons of plastic daily, has canceled a contract for 11 million plastic shopping bags, and is testing a shipboard trash compactor. It is also developing a waste processor that can melt plastics and turn them into bricks. The Navy's projected cost of meeting the treaty provision: at least $1 million a ship. Supporters of the Marpol treaty readily acknowledge that it will not totally eliminate plastic pollution. "If a guy goes out on deck late...
...Leningrad library fire was a natural disaster. Deliberate book burning seems not only criminal but evil. Why? Is it worse to destroy a book by burning it than to throw it into the trash compactor? Or to shred it? Not in effect. But somehow the irrevocable reduction of words to smoke and, poof!, into nonentity haunts the imagination. In Hitler's bonfires in 1933, the works of Kafka, Freud, Einstein, Zola and Proust were incinerated -- their smoke a prefigurement of the terrible clouds that came from the Nazi chimneys later...
...journey resulted from a deal made by Alabama Entrepreneur Lowell Harrelson, founder of National Waste Contractors, Inc., to haul away a massive batch of refuse from Islip, N.Y., and other townships. After being freighted with the garbage -- which was mashed into some 2,200 untidy bundles by a giant compactor -- Harrelson's leased barge was hitched to the tugboat Break of Dawn and set sail on March...
...list could go on. But I tire of creation. Just remember, David Letterman has legitimized playful destruction on national television--playing with his hydraulic steam compactor, dropping things off five story buildings. So don't feel timid: take heart, go forth and destroy...