FRESH Kills landfill in New York, until recently the biggest rubbish tip on earth, was said to be one of the very few man-made objects visible from space, along with the Great Wall of China. Of the two, the blob-shaped dump would probably have been easier to spot than the ribbon of the wall, until New York's city government decided to redevelop Fresh Kills as a park a few years ago.

In its way, Fresh Kills was an emblem of American culture, just as the Great Wall is an emblem of Chinese culture. This is not to say that American culture is trash, but that trash is culture. Different countries' attitudes to rubbish turn out to be just as distinctive as their historical monuments.

Countries differ, obviously, in the amount of trash they generate. The very poorest ones produce almost none at all. Material that would qualify as trash in richer places is fed to livestock, or spread as compost, or burnt for fuel, or recycled in some other way. A problem of waste disposal arises only when people get rich enough to buy manufactured goods that they cannot or will not recycle personally. Plastic bags carpet much of the developing world because locals do not know how to turn them into anything else.

Wealth is a good predictor of how much a country throws away, but it is not the best. Veolia Environmental Services, a firm that collects or disposes of rubbish in 33 countries, commissioned a global study of garbage called the "World Waste Survey". It found that a country's consumption of paper is a strong indicator of how full its dustbins will be. In several European countries where paper consumption is growing more slowly than the economy as a whole, the correlation between disposable income and disposal of waste is beginning to break down.

Different countries dispose of their rubbish in different ways. Americans and Australians, with lots of land at their disposal, like to dump it. More crowded places, such as Singapore and Taiwan, and ones with great reverence for their landscape, such as Switzerland, tend to burn it. Germans, says Denis Gasquet of Veolia, have a soft spot for industrial schemes that recycle waste or generate energy from it. Even within globalised pressure groups, such as Greenpeace, he observes, activists in one country cannot agree with their counterparts in another about how waste should be processed.

God proposes, man disposes

Veolia's report unearths some oddities. Residents of cities in China proper throw out roughly one-quarter more than the citizens of Hong Kong do, and three-quarters more than the average Taiwanese. Japan seems to produce only a fraction of the quantities of hazardous waste that Europe and America churn out―perhaps because Japanese officials class fewer things as hazardous, speculates Philippe Chalmin, the author of the report.

On the whole, this variety is good. It is likely to nurture a wide range of technologies for waste disposal, and so provide more options for everyone. It reflects the fact that countries with different geographies and histories will have different environmental priorities.

But if garbage disposal is as much a matter of cultural norms as of technology or regulation or economics, might the same be said of other fraught environmental issues? Green activists tend to speak about their favoured policies as if these were dictated by science alone. Budgets might come into the calculation, but the implication is still that reasonable people would all do the same thing, given enough time and money. In the case of trash, at least, that is a load of rubbish.