This may sound like a dumb question, but have you ever given any thought as to where your garbage goes after you throw it away? If you’re like most people the trail ends after you toss your refuse into the garbage bin and the city trash collectors pick it up. Where does all that waste go? Is it thrown into some black hole never to be seen (or smelled) again? Unfortunately, this isn’t the case and as my curiosity got the best of me, I spent a little time researching the answer to this question and found some interesting if not frightening information.
Did you know that the average American produces approximately 4.5 pounds of waste every single day, or 1,642 pounds each year. Considering there are 300 Million people in the U.S. that means we produce 675,000 tons of trash every single day. Much of the stuff that fills our landfills is packaging, especially in the form of containers, but office paper, disposable diapers, Styrofoam inserts, and plastic bags also contribute to the total waste production of our country. Paper waste still makes up about 35%, and plastic makes up 13% of the total material filling up our landfills and considering that most of these items can be recycled; this ever increasing waste problem is easily avoidable.
When typical household trash is picked up by a collection truck, it is taken either to a landfill or a Waste-to-Energy (WtE) incinerator. Waste-to-Energy is the process of creating energy in the form of electricity or heat from the incineration of a waste source. Most WtE processes produce electricity directly through combustion, or produce a combustible fuel commodity, such as methane, methanol, ethanol or other synthetic fuels. Currently, in the United States, about 26% of the waste generated is recycled or composted, 8% is burned at incinerators, and the remaining 66% is disposed of in landfills.
Based on the latest EPA data there are currently about 1,700 landfills in the United States which is a drop from the nearly 8,000 landfills in the U.S. in 1988. While the number of landfills has significantly decreased, the actual average landfill size has significantly increased as well. Some of the biggest landfills receive as much as 4 Million tons of waste every single year, that’s 8 Billion pounds a year. If the average landfill is open for 35 or 40 years, that means that it would collect 320,000,000,000 Billion pounds over its lifetime. It’s no wonder that the highest land mass here in South Florida is our local landfill.
Think about it, one of the easiest ways to reduce the amount of waste that makes its way to our nation’s landfills is to just ask yourself what happens to all the stuff you throw away. After researching the information on your own you’ll be amazed at all the trash and junk that is carelessly thrown out and contributing to the pollution of our planet. So remember, the next time you reach for the garbage can to throw something away, think about the landfill problem and just maybe you’ll toss that container into the blue recycling bin instead.
