Comprehensive Examination in English: Session I
Part A

for Interdisciplinary Teaching
Michelle Stappler, Regents High School Examination

*Eight million people throw away a lot of garbage: 5,000 tons a day to be exact. The waste was spilling out of one of the largest dumps on the outskirts of Tianjin, China's third largest municipality, when local officials hit on a not-so-novel solution: pigs. Now 200 hungry hogs have nibbled their way through what used to be a 17-meter-high mountain of garbage, recycling edible delights such as cabbage leaves, rice, spoiled meat and other leftovers into rich fertilizer that is used to nourish vegetable patches. Whatever is not eaten goes through four modified cement mixers that can separate organic fertilizer from waste residue, thus producing a compost sold to peasants.

Not far away in the garbage-laden surroundings, 10,000 chickens are laying their eggs. They were brought in to test pollution levels. If these highly sensitive creatures remain productive, officials reason, the dump turned natural-fertilizer center must be a healthy environment. China dubs this blissfully organic setting with 38 employees the ''garbage manor,'' and hails its waste-disposal process as a model for dumps nationwide.

Launched in late 1988, the innovative, low-tech method costs almost nothing to maintain and even turns a profit. With no other dumping ground available in the heavily populated region, municipal officials, strapped for money, turned to traditional methods. Recruiting hogs seemed logical in a country where pigs are dubbed ''walking fertilizer factories.'' Explains Zhao Baoyuan, director of Tianjin's bureau of environmental sanitation: ''We not only wanted to make waste harmless, we also wanted to turn it into a natural resource."

In an effort to attract foreign investors and raise living standards, Tianjin has been at the forefront of China's Sisyphean battle against garbage. Faced with a complex problem, Zhao and his colleagues have shown that it is possible to use simple methods to get impressive results. Such creative techniques are badly needed in a country where revamping a deteriorating garbage-disposal system will cost an estimated $3 billion. ''This is the way that suits our country's reality,'' says Zhao. ''We do not need much investment to get- high value.''