Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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North of Yuma, east of the Colorado River and smack in the middle of nowhere, Quartzsite is not an official town. Never incorporated, possessing no mayor, no schools, no stoplight, no town water or sewer system, no zoning rules or local police, the "gem of the desert" is home year round to maybe a thousand people...
...Bonnie Jackson run a shop for gold prospectors. "Lot of folks here got the fever, gold fever," he says. The Jacksons have done well during their first year in business selling gold pans, metal detectors, black-sand magnets and an instrument that separates gold flecks from gravel. ("You run water through it, and the gold walks up the veins into your little catchall. Just walks on up like it has a mind of its own.") "Folks around here like to dig in the dirt...
...Waste Management to build the country's largest plastic-recycling operation. The facility, which will open in 1990, will separate and clean 40 million lbs. of the material a year. But that will only dent the problem: the U.S. annually produces 1.6 billion lbs. of plastic soda, milk and water bottles, enough to fill a line of dump trucks stretching from New York City to Cleveland...
Some firms argue that degradable, not recycled, plastics are a better solution to the waste problem. Archer Daniels Midland claims to have invented a kind of cornstarch additive that makes plastics totally disintegrate when exposed to soil, water or sunlight; currently, no more than 0.5% of all U.S. plastic products are degradable. But for the process to work, a certain amount of moisture must be present in the soil, and critics argue that landfills are not always moist enough for the plastic to break down. Even some trash that deteriorates can take years to do so. Says Jeanne Wirka...
There's no mayor, no water system, not even a stoplight. But each winter, tiny Quartzsite, Ariz., grows to absorb 200,000 people, only to shrink again come spring. What attracts the snowbirds...