Measures long advocated by environmentalists include limiting the use of nonbiodegradable plastics, banning nonreturnable containers, placing a tax on throwaway items and taxing household goods and cars with short lifetimes.

The salad that comes with the dinner is a throwaway item: chopped lettuce, grated carrot, red cabbage and a hard cherry tomato in a small plastic bowl.

Last year the center published the first "Encyclopedia of Ephemera" (Routledge), which contains more than 400 thumbnail histories of throwaway items, including air-sickness bags, lavatory paper and garment labels.

Surely anything we can do to curb the ridiculous amount of wasteful production of plastics and short lived throwaway items the better?

AGES 12 AND UP - Another throwaway item in the young-man-as-moron genre will lure a few teenagers.

On the roof, the water tank enclosure, often a throwaway item, was handled like a Gothic folly, its octagonal form held up by buttresses.

It does seem unnecessarily inflammatory, but the 20% enrichment thing looks to me like a throwaway item for the Iranians.

But it is not "a throwaway item," Ms. Friedman said, adding that the company considers the investment in Knopf Kards money well spent.

The video contains a mini ramp and strange throwaway items like doors and pieces of wood.

Scraps of newspaper, printed fliers and other throwaway items anchor the compositions to the familiar reality of littered streets, diminishing the ambiguous transcendence that characterizes Mr. Sedgwick's best work.