Steve Volan was the only Monroe County Solid Waste Management District board member to give a straight answer when asked if glass and other materials collected at the Recycling Center and rural drop-off sites are recycled or landfilled.

Board member Patrick Stoffers said he believes glass is being recycled but couldn't say for sure.

"Do I know?" he said. "I have never gotten in my vehicle and followed a truck to its final destination."

The Farmers Market may be the only place in town on Saturday mornings that is busier than the Recycling Center on South Walnut Street.

But while the environmentally conscious hordes that inundate the center with glass, plastic, cardboard and other materials believe their meticulously sorted household refuse will be remanufactured into new products, there is no guarantee that they will.

"If it's being landfilled, then the city should know that and be communicating that to the residents and businesses so that we are not wasting our time separating trash for no reason," one concerned citizen familiar with the situation said in an e-mail to the Alternative.

Identifying the most astonishing figure in a folder full of state government documents on Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) in Hartford City is a daunting task.

For example, the East-Central Indiana community of 7,000 has 17 combined-sewage "overflow points" on four small creeks, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM). Only Kokomo and Muncie have more, with 30 and 23, respectively.

But, discharge reports from March 2002 indicate that untreated sewage flowed into Little Lick Creek, Moore Prong, Mud Run and Big Lick Creek on 239 occasions in 2001. The combined durations of these releases equaled 58 days of continuous sewage flow a year, 26.75 hours every week.

Still, city, state and federal officials identified Hartford City's CSO pollution as needing remediation 35 years ago.

Anyone familiar with Bloomington knows that we operate on a different calendar here. In college communities like ours, summer arrives early, just about the time the redbuds bloom and tomato plants hit the soil in South-Central Indiana.

Consistent with that academic calendar, summer has arrived in Bloomington. And just a little more than a week into it, I can tell you that 2008 is going to be a good one.

For example, Alternative summer always means that a new group of aspiring young journalism students, eager to learn more about craft and community, join our cause. Already this year, three of my former students and I have begun reporting a project we're calling The Other Bloomington, which will be an in-depth, journalistic exploration of poverty in Bloomington.

We're launching the project in this issue with "Hunger spikes in Bloomington" by Jaclyn Baker and "Food bank reaches warehouse deals" by Audree Notoras, and we have a still-evolving, ambitious agenda of stories and angles to pursue over the summer.

Rather than raking through the stacks at IDEM, I'm expanding my CSO or combined sewer overflow education by raking through Alternative editor Steven Higgs' file cabinet. Hopefully, my summarization of an article Steve wrote for IDEM in 2000 about the E. coli riddled Little Lick Creek in Hartford City (our next destination) will better prepare me, and others, for what to expect.

Reading the article, I learned something new right away. Not all strains of E. coli, a bacteria living in the intestines of warm-blooded animals, produce the same results. One of the more threatening strains, O157:H7, causes the bloody diarrhea and abdominal cramps often associated with an E. coli infection. This strain and others are found in Little Lick Creek.

Three variables, according to the article, account for this strain in Little Lick: runoff from nearby agribusinesses, failing septic systems and, not surprisingly, untreated waste from CSOs.

As we delve into combined sewer overflows or CSOs, (having everything to do again with poop, only now, from we humans) many of you are probably thinking, "Here we go again." I know I did.

But I've learned through the "Indiana Environment Revisited" project that one of the major environmental threats we're up against is the export of human and animal waste. And while other looming threats like the pending coal plant in Edwardsport or the construction of I-69 have nothing to do with what comes from our bodies, one major connection tying these and many environmental movements together is water.

The mercury from coal plants, the destruction of Indiana's wetlands by I-69 and the contaminants from CAFOs and CSOs all threaten our water, the most important natural resource on Earth.

As this is our only "Indiana Environment Revisited" piece this issue, it looks like it's up to me, for the moment, to explain the threat of CSOs and why anyone should care, as I am learning them from the Improving Kids' Environments (IKE) Website.

When we decided to launch the "Indiana Environment Revisited" (IER) project, I knew it would be an emotional journey. As an Indiana-based environmental journalist for the past 27 years, I'm intimately familiar with the anger and frustration that comes from being victimized by our state's extreme brand of environmental neglect.

I expected to encounter a long list of fevered citizens, like Rex Jones from Henry County, who would tell us, "My honest opinion of IDEM? ... They are a big joke." I mean, I couldn't disagree with him or any of the other rural Hoosiers we've interviewed in the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) series, all of whom echoed Jones's sentiment.

But because I spent four years working inside IDEM with the Media and Communications Services team, getting to know and, on more than a few occasions, befriending the men and women who are legislatively charged with protecting Indiana citizens from air, water and land pollution, I knew I was venturing onto sensitive new terrain.

Add Coxton citizen Barbara Artinian to the list of rural Hoosiers who would bust a gut at 1999 claims by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) that one of the agency's priorities is to "target children's health."

IDEM's mantra du jour in early 1999 was "protecting children from environmental threats." It had a "children's environmental health coordinator." One of the state's most powerful industrial lobbyists once characterized IDEM Commissioner John Hamilton's emphasis on it as "playing the kid card."

The lead story in the January-February edition of IDEM's newspaper, the Indiana Environment & Materials Exchange, began: "Parents of the estimated 100,000 children who attend child-care facilities in Indiana will be better prepared to protect their children from environmental threats under a new initiative announced in December by IDEM and first lady Judy O'Bannon."

The first CAFO supporter is in.

The e-mail came on a Monday. No name was attached, just an address and the initials DP. "We all love our technology," DP wrote, "TV's, Computers, I-pod's. I don't believe consumers will pay for a 1975 production system."

I'd like to start by saying I don't own an iPod.

All joking aside, although I really don't own an iPod, I'd like to make it clearer where I stand on CAFOs, considering I knew little about them until about a month-and-a-half ago. Based on the information I've learned in that time, the call here is not to eradicate factory farms, as CAFO’s are also called, though in a perfect world, we'd give farming back to the farmers.

Eric Stickdorn routinely employs proper medical terminology when he describes the human body's reactions to life near a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO), a subject he knows intimately.

Wikipedia, for example, defines "olfactory fatigue" as "the temporary, normal inability to distinguish a particular odor after a prolonged exposure to that airborne compound." That's how Stickdorn explains the fact that, when his mouth burns from ground-level air pollution from the dairy CAFO next to his Wayne County farm, he can't even smell the manure gases.

But the health impacts from constantly inhaling the gaseous excretions of hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of animals, like many rural Hoosiers do, are so overwhelming that Stickdorn sometimes has to invent terms.