Solid waste can be difficult to count. This may be hard to believe for some, because garbage is a very tangible thing, and it is difficult to conceive that it is not easy to find, assess, and quantify. Nonetheless, for a variety of reasons, creating accurate counts of solid waste is not simple. At one local municipal facility, for instance, ingoing tonnages of one class of materials do not match outgoing tonnages, as they should. It is thought that this occurs because it is a multiple use facility. That is, materials that enter the facility and are counted as going to one management area, actually are directed to another. Because there is no fiscal impact to the choice of where the materials are sent, and it would be very difficult operationally to insure these mistakes do not occur, the operators allow these practices to continue. But this means that hundreds of tons of garbage “disappear” over the course of a year.
