How Bad is Our Waste Problem?
This is a heap of waste built up near the sea. (Photo: Rawpixel)
Everyone knows that we have a big waste issue, but for most, it’s hard to understand just how big it is. The average person in the U.S. produces close to 5 pounds of waste a day. That is 1,642 pounds every year per person. More than half of our waste ends up in landfills. Here in Grandview, our trash goes to the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio.
Around 22% of the waste we produce is food. This is a big issue considering more than 44 million people in the U.S. alone suffer from hunger. Another 19% of our waste is plastic which can’t be broken down easily and leaves microplastics everywhere they are left and they are left pretty much everywhere. 0.5% of the waste produced each year ends up in the ocean. This may not sound a lot but this is multiple million tons. This is also probably a lower estimate.
The US alone dumps around 38 million tonnes of trash each year. There are currently 5.25 trillion macro and micro pieces of plastic in the ocean. Only around 30% of trash is biodegradable. No matter the effects we continue to keep dumping more and more into our oceans. Some of the waste that ends up in the ocean starts in poor areas where you can’t just put a bin at the curb and your trash is gone. If these areas have rivers leading to the ocean it is easy just to dump their trash in the rivers, to try and clean up their towns.
Another major issue in our waste industry is how little we recycle. According to the EPA, around 75% of our waste is recyclable. If we recycled all the waste we could our problem would not be as bad but we only recycle 32% of our waste. Also with lots of products being held in single-use plastics, we are becoming ever more wasteful.
In our society, it is more than common for companies to try and make products that only last a certain amount of time so you have to get a new one. This is an issue as it not only makes it so normal people have to spend more money but also this fills landfills and oceans with even more waste.
Another issue we have is not recycling metals. It is very common for metals that should have been recycled to end up in a landfill. This is an issue because some metals like steel take lots of energy to be made and their production also makes lots of greenhouse gasses. Steel can be infinitely recycled without losing its strength so having it end up in landfills is just extremely wasteful.
All the things I talked about in this story are issues that need to be fixed and it might seem that because you are just one person you can not do anything about it. But you can, even if it’s something small it’s still something.
A river in the Phillipines completly covered in trash. (Photo: Jay Ganzon)