Excerpted from the book Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest, (c) 1996 by John J Kohut and Roland Sweet

Anchorage, Alaska, requested an exemption from an Environmental Protection Agency rule requiring cities to remove at least 30 percent of organic waste from incoming sewage before treating it. Officials pointed out that the city had so little organic waste to begin with that its sewage before treatment than most cities sewage after treatment. The EPA, nevertheless, insisted that the city comply with the rule, forcing it to have to pay fish processors to dump unused fish parts into city sewers so there would be enough organic waste to remove.