The Harvard Business Review highlighted a story from Bloomberg about the number of US rail cars filled with waste as an indicator of economic growth.
The stories stated that the number of cars jumped to 79,044 in April and May 2010, an increase of 45% from a year earlier, according to the Association of American Railroads. That’s the biggest such increase since at least 1994. The cargo consisted of iron and steel (42%), municipal waste and demolition products (32%), paper (11%), ashes (5%), nonferrous metals (4%), miscellaneous (4%), and chemical waste (1%).
This is an unusual statistic and source of optimism about the economy, but something that has not gone up since 1994 got our attention.
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