Numlock Sunday: January 6, 2018

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Katherine Ellen Foley of Quartz who wrote “There are roughly 27 tons of garbage in Yosemite thanks to the government shutdown.” Here's what I wrote about it:

Every year, visitors to Yosemite generate 2,200 tons of garbage. There were an average of 118,889 December visitors to the national park from 2001 to 2016, and January sees an average of 108,026 visitors. Now, due to a government shutdown, nobody is being paid to remove that garbage nor is anyone maintaining the bathrooms. Given those rates of waste generation and park visitation, that means an estimated 26.9 tons of garbage is accumulating in Yosemite 12 days into the shutdown. 

Katherine can be found at Quartz but also has a newsletter of her own called Scrap Facts, a weekly roundup of the stuff she l…