The State of Waste

The Everyday Choice

Every day I throw something in the trash. I have four trash bins. One for food waste and compostable material "if it grows it goes", one for plastic and metal, one for glass, and one for trash. My kids often walk up to the trash cans and ask "Which one does this go in?". Unless it is food or a compostable, the answer is almost always, "Hmmm.. that's a tough one."

Recycling isn't easy.

1. Products are often mixed material (e.g. glass and metal, cardboard and plastic).

2. Some products are hard to clean. Yes you, peanut butter jar.

3. Plastics have numbers and letter coding that needs to be memorized.

4. Most products have three components that need to be recycled. The container they are shipped in, the packaging of the product, and the product itself. Each component has its own recycling need.

5. Products are covered in adhesive stickers and tape.

Any of these choices gets a product into the regular trash bin instead of getting recycled.

State of Waste in the U.S.

In 2018 the EPA released a comprehensive National Overview of waste levels. The data goes back to 1960 and shows overall levels of waste generation, breakdown by material types, as well as recycling trends. I'd have never guessed food and paper products make up almost 50% of all waste.

Landfills, dumps and incinerators separate, capture, and attempt to safely manage the 300 million tons of trash produced in the U.S. each year. Let's do the math. 300 million times 2,000 pounds.

600,000,000,000 lbs of trash per year

That comes out to six billion pounds of trash.

Landfills, Dumps and Incinerators

Earth911 did an excellent five part series on where waste goes.

There are also excellent videos showing how some of the largest cities in the U.S. manage trash collection and waste disposal. To put it simply, trash and waste disposal is a big business. In one video the dump explains how they clear almost $250,000 each day.

Clarity in Recycling

Better data and information is needed on products and on packaging. Households need the confidence to put their waste in the proper disposal category. When making a buying decision, knowledge of the overall recyclability of the transportation package, product package, and product can help reduce waste.