Recycling, once practiced intensely, was no longer an option, forcing governments and business alike to seek alternatives. Those alternatives, in retrospect, seem absurd: when a massive earthquake struck Anchorage, Alaska, in 1964, destroying thousands of cars, residents disposed of them by dropping the vehicles off a 350-foot cliff; local Florida governments, overwhelmed by the hulks, started dumping them in the ocean out of a misplaced hope that they might form reefs.
