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Twig WalkingstickQ. Dear Twig: Where do the burnt black French fries that I throw out at a restaurant go? A. Probably into a hole in the ground. Here's their trip, in a nutshell: The trash in the can gets dumped with a flump in the back end of a garbage truck. The garbage truck drives to a dump, a landfill. The trash gets dumped in the dump, pa-dump. The trash and the burnt black fries in the trash get buried by tons of more dumped trash. The fries get cut off from oxygen, gak! But anaerobic ("an-air-OH-bik"; no oxygen) microbes jump in. They decompose the fries. The problem: Anaerobic decomposition--of burnt black fries, apple cores, muffin stumps, etc.--gives off methane, a strong greenhouse gas. And greenhouse gases, at too-high levels, can make Earth hotter and cause global climate change. Scientists say that's happening now. They say we should do things to slow down or stop it. Next: A thing we can do with those fries that can help! Biodegradably, Twig P.S. How big's the problem? The U.S. alone dumps some 26 million tons of food trash a year. 7/28/08 Date: 7/18/08
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