It was a beautiful afternoon, a day for moving slowly and enjoying the outside, even in New York City and even in the early evening as I headed off to Penn Station to begin the long commute home. And even though it was also the evening before trash day and the sidewalks were becoming crowded with bags of garbage and recycling. Although it was a year ago now, I remember having one of those random thoughts, the kind that pops into your mind one second and then leaves just as quickly. I thought, damn, there must be zillions of dollars of raw materials buried in landfills across the country. I briefly wondered why no one has started mining for them and continued on my way.

Until that is I finally got to the train and started plowing through the magazines I've become addicted to reading. And there, lo and behold, in Fast Company's July/August 2006 issue, I found an article titled "There's Gold in Them Thar Smelly Hills." The subtitle was equally intriguing: "A single ton of junked PCs has more gold than 17 tons of ore. That's why landfills might – just might – pay for their own cleanup."

In his article, Fast Company senior writer Alan Deutschman said that insatiable demand for raw materials in China and India was driving up the price of metals such as aluminum, copper, iron and steel. But Deutschman wrote that the increasing demand had a silver lining in that "private enterprise has a chance to create a market-driven solution." And he reported that at a recent IBM Global Innovation Outlook conference, a speaker kept the audience captivated by "suggesting we could treat landfills as though they were mines – and dig up the valuable metals buried in them."

"And there's plenty to dig for, says Patrick Atkins, the director of energy innovation at Alcoa. North American landfills contain more aluminum than we can produce by mining ores. He thinks the same is probably true of gold and copper, which are used in the circuit boards of computers and electronic gadgets. One ton of scrap from discarded PCs contains more gold than can be produced from 17 tons of gold ore – and humans throw away 20 million tons of electronic waste a year. Americans dispose of 50 million computers annually; by the end of this decade, the Japanese alone will have trashed 610 million cell phones."

The numbers are staggering. The amount of money that could be made by turning our garbage into raw materials is also incomprehensible to someone like me who is unable to balance a checkbook. But I'm confident that smart business minds are even now exploring the money that can be made by mining our landfills and otherwise capitalizing on our trash.

The alternative is too pathetic to consider.

PS -- I know this all happened a year ago, but I was reminded of the story this morning when my husband and I dropped off a computer and old television at our county's electronic recycling day. More on that soon ...