It is not something most of us really give a lot of thought to, trash. You just throw it away and it disappears, right?
Wrong.
The average American tosses out four and a half pounds of trash each day, one of the most common things, the disposable cup.
But have you ever considered what happens to that cup after you throw it out?
Bob Luliucci is Senior District Manager with Waste Management.
“We’re about 12,000 tons a day. It’s primarily MSW, which is municipal waste you would put outside on the curb for pickup. it’s paper, food waste, packaging.”
That cup most likely ends up here, in a landfill. If it contains styrofoam or plastic, it could take 50 years to decompose, that’s right 50 years!
“Plastic is one of the materials that takes the longest to decompose and be as it is for a long period of time.”
If you don’t think recycling is important consider this:
A plastic drink bottle can take up to 450 years to decompose.
An aluminum can: 80 to 200 years; a plastic bag, 10 to 20 years.
And it can take a disposable diaper 450 years to break down, according to The National Park Service.
Geri Rush handles community relations for Waste Management.
“I do think awareness is key here. People need to know to close the loop, not only to recycle products, but to buy recycled products.”
Waste Management runs most of the nation’s landfills.
The company is committed to recycling and would love consumers to think twice about what they throw away.
Luliucci believes that message may be beginning to sink in with consumers.
But the fact remains, we continue to produce more than 245-million tons of waste a day.
The top three things that people throw away are paper, yard waste, and food scraps. The good news about that is all of those things or most of that material is recyclable or you can compost it,” says Rush.
Paper products, like paper towels and napkins, tend to break down quickly, in about two to four weeks.
It’s about the same for an orange or banana peel.
Luliucci says it all depends on what’s in the mix.
“It starts breaking down right away. Again depending on what that material is. Food and materials like that will start breaking down as soon as it’s put in the landfill.”
One third of all garbage thrown away in this country is packaging that can take years or centuries to decompose.
Between Thanksgiving and the New Year we generate five-million extra tons of trash.
About four million tons is believed to be wrapping paper and shopping bags.
Rush says, “When you take a look, as a consumer what you are buying, a lot of things are made with more and more packaging these days and you can really make wise choices when you are purchasing things.”
Luliucci says it’s also about convenience.
“The easier we make it for the customer the more recyclables that we will be able to process. We have seen about a 30-percent improvement in our recyclables.”
The good news is nationwide recycling and composting divert close to 80-million tons of waste from landfills each year.
But most people agree we still have a long way to go.
It’s estimated that as much as 90-percent of what we throw away can be used again or recycled.
So you might want to think twice the next time you toss something into the trash.
And this footnote, the average office worker goes through about five hundred disposable cups a year.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Adrian Popa 10.15.08 at 7:04 pm
what are the most common things that are thrown away that are made of metal?
scott 10.17.08 at 10:21 am
soda cans
Mike K 07.13.10 at 12:07 am
As nice as it sounds for the environment, recycling doesn’t really do a whole lot to protect it when compared to landfills. Recycling for the most part is a waste of money and energy. It costs more than twice as much and takes three times as much energy to make recycled products as compared w/ virgin materials. Yes, it takes a long time for the the products to decompose, but do you know WHERE they decompose? Under the ground! It doesn’t affect animals much, if at all and all, and landfills are designed so that toxic sludge seeps into generators that can power your towns and cities.
The only thing worth recycling cost-wise is aluminum. It is actually better for our environment if we don’t recycle paper, because it encourages our defamed logging industry to PLANT MORE TREES! Do some real research before recycling, and don’t listen to just what you hear from people…..look at the facts.
Player3 07.14.10 at 1:29 pm
well wouldn’t it be nice if all the loggers gave a dámn about trees. It takes a long time for that tree to grow, to produce oxygen, to be a home for animals. It’s not like they care about any of that stuff. If we use less paper, we won’t have to wait 50 years for that tree to replace another that was fully grown, but took a couple of minutes to cut down. And you know what? Creating more and more landfills means we have less and less land. It takes decades before you can use that land for anything, and even then it only has limited uses. Recycling means less landfills, and more land to grow trees. How bout you do some research and look at the facts?