Students landfill diversion is wise move

Congratulations to the students and faculty at Regina Elementary School in Iowa City for being involved in using our resources in order to keep from supplying our misused landfills. (Multiply these young people by the millions and know it's a fantastically big deal!)

A great story in how it used to be in great grandpa's day: In the summer, a swill pail sat outside the kitchen door and all food scraps, including dishwater, went into the pail, which was dumped into a swill barrel by a hog yard fence. The pigs loved it.

After coming home from World War II, this grandpa visiting a Marine friend near Carlisle, where his father and friend had a business of picking up food garbage from Des Moines restaurants and stores and cooking it. They fed several hundred hogs with this “garbage.”

This venture was profitable but was brought to a close by garbage trucks that hauled all kinds of things to our so called modern-day landfills.

Robert Batey

Mount Pleasant