It makes me sad, angry and bewildered every time I see a black person littering, just blatantly tossing down with impunity and careless disregard for their surroundings the remnants of their ghetto diets and their ghetto lifestyles  

A little more than a year ago, I moved to South Korea to teach English to spoiled kindergartners. I was crammed into a small box apartment in the outskirts of Seoul furnished with only a mattress and a television I found in the trash. As the weeks went by, I started to notice that near the entrance of every single building in Korea was a "Garbage Watcher" who watches people take out their trash during the day, ensuring efficiency and respect for the dumpster.   

The Rumpke Sanitary Landfill in Colerain Township, colloquially known as Mount Rumpke, is massive. This behemoth monument to our mass consumption and throwaway culture towers as the highest point in Hamilton County, yet it's just the part visible from U.S. Route 27.  

I overestimated my ability to go green. Before I heard the term "waste audit" — a study of all the trash a corporation produces so that it can move toward improving its recycling rate — I was intrigued by the idea of being honest with myself. How much waste was my family producing? What's our share of humanity's descent into Wall-E world? I decided on a two-week project.