THE FACTS ABOUT TRASH

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW)—otherwise known as trash or garbage—consists of product packaging, grass clippings, furniture, clothing, bottles, food scraps, newspapers, appliances, and batteries. Not included are materials that also may be disposed in landfills but are not generally considered MSW, such as construction and demolition debris, municipal wastewater treatment sludges, and non-hazardous industrial wastes.

In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency reported  that U.S. residents, businesses, and institutions produced more than 251 million tons of municipal solid waste--garbage.

Every year more than 6 million tons of rubbish is dumped into the world’s oceans, according to the Australian Government, Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage, and the Arts. 

Waste in Britain is increasing 3 percent a year, and its dumps will be filled to capacity in nine years. 

The average American generates 4.6 lbs of garbage per day which primarily is compacted and buried in landfills.

In 1960 the U.S. Generated 88.1 million tons (2.7 pounds per person per day) of Municipal Solid Waste — garbage — and recycled 5.6 million tons. By 2005 the U.S was generating 245.7 million tons of garbage (4.6 pounds per person per day), recycling 58.4 million tons, and composting 20.6 million tons. Containers and packaging at 32%, made up the majority of the MSW in 2005. 

50% of the 2.7 billion gallons of oil sold annually in the United States is consumed (i.e. burned or leaked from the engine) the other 50%, or about 1.1 billion gallons, becomes used oil and 31% of used oil, or about 500 million gallons, never reaches a recycling program. 

Only about one-tenth of all solid garbage in the United States gets recycled.

Every year we fill enough garbage trucks to form a line that would stretch from the earth, halfway to the moon.

Each day the United States throws away enough trash to fill 63,000 garbage trucks.

Almost 1/3 of the waste generated the U.S. is packaging.

Americans throw away 570 diapers per second. That's 49 million diapers per day.  An average child will use between 8,000 -10,000 disposable diapers ($2,000 worth) before being potty trained. The U.S. will pay an average of $350 million annually to deal with diaper disposal and diapers take more than 300 years to decompose in a landfill.  

Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour. 

Paper waste makes for about 35% of the total material filling up landfills. Considering that most of this paper could be recycled, much of the waste problem is easily avoidable.

The amount of glass bottles Americans throw away every two weeks would have filled both World Trade Center towers.

Americans throw away enough aluminum cans to rebuild our commercial air fleet every three months, and enough iron and steel to supply all our nation's automakers every day.

Throwing away one aluminum can wastes as much energy as if that can were 1/2 full of gasoline.

In the U.S., an additional 5 million tons of waste is generated during the holidays. Four million tons of this is wrapping paper and shopping bags.

Americans throw away about 28 billion bottles and jars every year. 

Americans throw away enough office paper each year to build a 12-foot-high wall of paper from New York to Seattle.

Americans receive almost 4 million tons of junk mail every year. Most of it winds up in landfills.

The average American uses 650 pounds of paper a year.

It takes one 15-year-old tree to produce 700 grocery bags.

Every year nearly 900,000,000 trees are cut down to provide raw materials for American paper and pulp mills.

Each year American throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups. Even 500 years from now, the foam coffee cup you used today will be sitting in a landfill.  

Americans toss out enough paper & plastic cups, forks and spoons every year to circle the equator 300 times.

U.S. businesses now use about 21 million tons of paper every year. That's about 175 pounds of paper for each American.

Enough hazardous waste is generated in one year to fill the New Orleans Superdome 1,500 times over.

In one day, Americans get rid of 20,000 cars and 4,000 trucks and buses.

Forty-three thousand tons of food is thrown out in the United States each day.

Americans throw out about 270 million tires every year.

The average American throws away about 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per year. 

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “The improper disposal of unused medications by flushing them or pouring them down the drain may be harmful to fish, wildlife and their habitats.”  

Nearly 80% of marine debris comes from land-based sources, conveyed to oceans via urban runoff through storm drains. The main sources of plastic and other types of anthropogenic (human-made) debris in urban runoff include: litter (mostly bags, packaging and single-use disposable products), industrial discharges, garbage transportation, landfills, construction debris, and debris from commercial establishments and public venues.

America incinerates 108,234 tons of waste per day.


LANDFILLS

A bioreactor landfill is a landfill that is operated in a manner expected to increase the decomposition process, gas generation, and settlement compared to a traditional landfill.

Only two manmade structures on Earth are large enough to be seen from outer space: the Great Wall of China and the Fresh Kills landfill! 

Barges (which run 24 hours a day) deliver over 14,000 tons of New York City trash to Fresh Kills every day. (Notes: The Fresh Kills Landfills is closing soon and is only being kept open to receive debris from the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center Towers). 

In 1979, there were an estimated 18,500 landfills in the nation. In 1990 there were only about 6,300, and by 1995 it was estimated that only about 3,000 would still be open. In just 16 years the number of landfills dropped by 84%. During that same time there was an
80% increase in the amount of trash generated. 

70% of U.S. municipal solid waste gets buried in landfills. 

U.S. landfills are closing at the rate of 1 per day. 

A few northern European countries, along with Germany, have spent most of the last ten years developing strategies to reduce and dispose of their modern waste including: closing polluting landfills and investing heavily in recycling and trash reduction programs.



RECYCLE

Recycling requires far less energy, uses fewer natural resources, and keeps waste from piling up in landfills.

"Recycling" means separating, collecting, processing, marketing, and ultimately using a material that would have been thrown away. This morning's newspaper can be recycled for another morning's news or other paper products. Cans and bottles can be crafted for other uses.

Recent statistics indicate that America’s composting and recycling rate rose from 7.7% in 1960 to 17% in 1990. Currently the number is around 33% of waste stream.

Last year the amount of energy saved from recycling aluminum and steel cans, plastic and glass containers, newsprint and corrugated packaging was equivalent to the amount of gasoline used by almost 11 million cars or the amount of electricity consumed by 17.8 million Americans in a year.

A well-run curbside recycling program can cost anywhere from $50 to more than $150 per ton…trash collection and disposal programs, on the other hand, cost anywhere from $70 to more than $200 per ton.

Unfortunately, recycling still costs more than landfill in most locales.

Recycling in the U.S. Is a $236 billion a year industry. More than 56,000 recycling and reuse enterprises employ 1.1 million workers nationwide.

Recycling offers significant energy savings over manufacturing with virgin materials. (Manufacturing with recycled aluminum cans uses 95% less energy).

In 2007 the amount of energy saved from recycling aluminum and steel cans, plastic PET and glass containers, newsprint and corrugated packaging was equivalent to:
• The amount of electricity consumed by 17.8 million Americans in one year.
• 29% of nuclear electricity generation in the U.S. in one year.
• 7.9% of electricity generation from fossil fuels in the U.S. in one year.
• 11% of the energy produced by coal-fired power plants in the U.S.
• The energy supplied from 2.7% of imported barrels of crude oil into the U.S.
• The amount of gasoline used in almost 11 million passenger automobiles in one year.

Making paper from recycled paper reduces contributions to air pollution by 95%.

Recycling a stack of newspaper just 3 feet high saves one tree.

Glass can be recycled an indefinite number of times and never wears out. Making glass from recycled materials cuts related water pollution by 50%.

Enough energy is saved to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours by recycling just one glass container. Each year, Americans throw away about 28 billion bottles and jars.

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to keep a 60-watt bulb burning for almost four hours or run your television for three hours. Or an 11 watt CFL bulb for 20 hours.

Recycling an aluminum soda can saves 96% of the energy used to make a can from ore, and produces 95% less air pollution and 97% less water pollution.   Or better put, it takes the energy equivalent of half a soda can of gasoline to produce one soda can from bauxite ore.

It takes 90% less energy to recycle an aluminum can than to make a new one.

Americans landfill enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months.

1,500 aluminum cans are recycled every second in the U.S.

5 plastic (PET bottles) yield enough fiber for one extra large T-shirt, one square foot of carpet, or enough fiber fill to fill one ski jacket.

The textile recycling industry, with some 2,000 companies, removes 2.5 billion pounds of post consumer textile product waste annually from the solid waste stream.

Approximately 75 % (750,000 tons) of the pre-consumer textile waste that is generated is diverted from our landfills and recycled.

Between 1990 and 2003, the United States exported nearly 7 billion pounds of used clothing and worn textile products around the world. (World Trade Atlas) 

Recycling one ton of cardboard saves over 9 cubic yards of landfill space.

Every year Americans generate around 14 million tons of food waste which is 106 pounds of food waste per person-- 570,000 tons of this is composted for a 4.1% recovery rate. The rest, or 13.4 million tons is incinerated or landfilled and occupies 6.3 million cubic yards of landfille.

The Container Recycling Institute (CRI) estimates that the 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million. Over the past twenty years we've worth over $12 billion on today's market. Some day we may be mining our landfills for the resources we've buried. 

BAGS

According to a life cycle analysis by Franklin Associates, Ltd, [pdf] plastic bags create fewer airborne emissions and require less energy from cradle to grave.

Given 10 thousand of each bag: plastic create 9.1 cubic pounds of solid waste vs. 45.8 cubic pounds for paper; plastic creates 17.9 pounds of atmospheric emissions vs. 64.2 pounds for paper; plastic creates 1.8 pounds of waterborne waste vs. 31.2 pounds for paper.

Paper bags can hold anywhere from 50 % to 400 % more stuff than plastic bags, depending on how they're packed. The numbers here assume that each paper bag holds 50 percent more than each plastic bag, meaning that it takes one and half plastic bags to equal a paper bag -- it's not a one-to-one comparison, even though plastic still comes out ahead.

Even though recycling paper bags quickly offsets the overall environmental impact, because plastic bags use much less energy to begin with, they still ends up creating less solid and waterborne waste and airborne emissions.

Plastic bags and packaging account for a major part of our waste in landfills and are one of the top items of litter along with cigarette butts and Styrofoam. Plastic bags are light, hard to contain, fly easily in wind, float along readily in water currents, get tangled up in trees, fences, poles, and so for, and block the drainage. 

Neither paper nor plastic bags are the best choice for our environment; choosing reusable bags instead is the way to go. From an energy standpoint, according to this Australian study, canvas bags are 14 times better than plastic bags and 39 times better than paper bags, assuming that canvas bags are used 500 times during their life cycle.

UPCYCLING

“A German chemist, Michael Braungart, and architect, William McDonough, coined the term “upcycling” in their 2002 book, ‘Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.’ Simply put, to upcycle means to use waste products to make useful things instead of throwing them into our landfills. 

As this recent article  in Fast Company details, it’s not currently profitable for recyclers to accept much beyond the most common, high volume items, like aluminum, paper, and a select few types of plastic. They don’t even consider taking candy and snack wrappers; there’s just too many comingled materials, too difficult to create a consistent, usable result on the other end. Change has to happen at the manufacturing and packaging end of this cycle.

Artists and crafters have long been reusing materials to create their wares. Now that the ‘green’ movement has taken off, it’s become a marketing point for their products, donning the new hot term upcycling and producing everything from sculpture  and journals  to clothing , bags  and  purses. 

Everyone is joining the upcycling effort from rock bands, such as Cloud Cult, to entrepreneurial business like Terracycle. All Cloud Cult products are 100% post-consumer recycled, and all tours are greened with energy offsets through NativeEnergy.com. Esurance has helped green the Monolith Festival at Red Rocks and the Sasquatch festival. Reverb Rock has greened tours by Andrew Bird, the Beastie Boys and the Blue Man Group, and also helps educate fans attending their shows on things they can do to offset their own carbon footprint.

Terracycle makes a natural soil amendment from Worm Poop and feeds the worms trash in the process:  and other products. They’re also one of the few companies taking candy wrappers and other comingled waste products difficult to recycle and turing them into a variety of new upcycled products.

If you’re looking for some trash to upcycle or want to shop second hand (reuse) then check out FreeCycle and CraigsList  to give or receive FREE stuff.

RECYCLING is the number one solution to the garbage problem. Newspapers, aluminum containers, and certain plastics can be recycled to reuse in a different form, thus saving space in landfills.

REDUCINGthe amount of garbage you produce is another way to help with the waste problem--buying less, buying things in smaller packaging, and reuse.

REUSING what you have, buy used, or find ways to upcycle what you have. Donating things you no longer want; passing them on to others extends their usable life — one persons trash is another’s treasure. 

Find out how you can help. http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/index.htm