“Where did the ankles in the landfill come from?” This unusual title is taken from Beaumont Enterprise, who ask this in connection with the discovery of several body parts found at the Beaumont city landfill.

Police say no charges have currently been filed and suspect the parts are lower  extremities that generated from surgical amputations. Police say the human waste  was originally discovered by a landfill staff member and so far a total of 15  parts have been found.

But that is an awful lot of ankles!

An interesting aside is the note that “The body parts should have been incinerated, buried or treated with chemicals or  steam, or both, to render the item unrecognizable, and then dropped off at a  sanitary landfill, the Texas  Commission on Environmental Quality said in a news release last month.

That seems like an interesting combination of options that allow ATT processing of tissue wastes – surely not – AND burial, but only before sanitary landfill. Have the reporters got it wrong, or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality?

Or have we all got it wrong, since we are happy to bury entire bodies in a flimsy chipboard coffin or sometimes no coffin at all, in a beautiful greenfield cemetery without the benefit of impervious clay liner or leachate management, but with a few flowers and a headstone. Yet put an item of tissue waste into a landfill and the regulators are in a frenzy.

Rules are rules. But it’s a strange old world.
Read more: http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Where-did-the-ankles-in-the-landfill-come-from-3942501.php#ixzz29GBdJOg0