“We toss out 7 pounds of trash a day each, spending billions to manage it” So burn it through waste-to-energy plants and turn the residue into building aggregate. Sheesh what a fuss over complete garbage
Each week, we push our trash to the curb, and it seemingly disappears. But where does it all go: the spent cartons of milk, the computer keyboard fried by spilled coffee, those empty dog food cans?
A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to find out. In 2009, they began attaching transmitter chips to thousands of pieces of ordinary garbage. They tossed this “smart trash” into the bin, sat back and watched the tortuous, disturbing path that our garbage often takes: the meanderings of electronic waste as it headed for distant shores, of ratty old sneakers that ran the equivalent of a dozen marathons, of printer cartridges that traversed the continent not once but twice on the road to recycling.
This clever experiment threw a spotlight on the biggest, costliest, dirtiest secret about our garbage: our ignorance of how much we produce, what it contains and what happens to it once it leaves our hands.
Take the nation’s official trash tally—used alike by environmentalists, businesses and policy makers—which maintains that the average American tosses out 4.4 pounds of trash a day, with about a third getting recycled and the rest going to landfills. These numbers are found in the Environmental Protection Agency’s exhaustive annual compendium “Municipal Solid Waste in the United States”—America’s trash Bible—and are determined by an array of byzantine estimates and simulations, based on manufacturing data and the life expectancy of products.
But the EPA’s “materials flow analysis” dates back to the bad old days when there were 10 times the number of town dumps and many more illegal ones, with little actual weighing and regulation. Today the business model of the landfill and recycling business depends on precise measurement (and billing per ton), so we have much more real-world data. Using these sources, the most recent survey conducted by Columbia University and the trade journal BioCycle found that Americans actually throw out much more than the EPA estimates, a whopping 7.1 pounds a day, and that less than a quarter of it gets recycled.
Almost 50 years ago a family in my neighborhood went to Germany for vacation. When they returned, the son told me how they had visited the local powerplant and seen how they burned the garbage to generate power. The trucks would dump the garbage in a large pit collection area and a front end loader would pile the trash onto conveyor belts where it metal was separated out and everything else was burned and the metal recycled.
I’ve always wondered why we don’t do that here. I guess it is because we are freaking stupid and our government is even dumber.
How ’bout with 3.79 million square miles of land,
it’s hardly an issue.