Lead emissions, for example, have practically been eliminated. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, water quality has improved generally since the 1960s, and in some cases dramatically. Water quality in the Great Lakes region is dramatically better, as is shown by the return of the bald eagle and many other kinds of wildlife to the region. There are more acres of forest in the U.S. than at anytime since the 1950s. According to the U.S. Forest Service, annual timber growth in the U.S. now exceeds harvest by 37 percent, and has exceeded harvest every year since 1952.
Solid waste is managed more safely in the U.S. than at any previous time in history.
Today's landfills are light-years ahead of yesterday's dumps and are required to have many safety features, such as liners and sophisticated liquid and gas col lection and treatment systems. Ground-level ultraviolet radiation levels, which should be rising if the ozone layer is in fact being depleted, are falling. All the garbage produced in the U.S. for the next five hundred years would fit in a single landfill measuring twenty miles to a side. Landfills today are much safer than those of twenty a nd even ten years ago and pose no known human health threat. Mandatory recycling is unnecessary, costly, and sometimes produces more air and water pollution and more energy consumption than would burial or incineration with energy recovery.