Each year, Americans generate 389.5 million tons of municipal solid waste, 69 percent of which gets landfilled. As Edward Humes breaks it down in his eye-opening opus Garbology, that's about 7.1 pounds of garbage per person per day, 365 days a year.
Collectively, Americans generate 18 times the weight of the entire adult population in trash each year.
Individually, each of us is on track to generate 102 TONS of trash across a lifetime.
The waste we create is literally bigger than ourselves.
Looking in the trash mirror on America Recycles Day. Photos by Sven Eberlein.
There are a few municipalities that have done a great job at diverting waste from landfill through composting, recycling and creative reuse of materials, most notably San Francisco's landmark Zero Waste efforts, which I've written about here.
And yet, as a nation, we recycle barely a third of all the material goods that flow through our hands. We trash 40 percent of our food supply every year, valued at $165 billion, the single largest component of solid waste in U.S. landfills. The fact that 97% of all food and food scraps end up in landfills instead of being composted — accounting for almost a fifth of all U.S. methane emissions — is dwarfed only by the sad notion that the wasted food could feed millions of Americans.
While it has become somewhat fashionable to dismiss this garbage crisis as an old-school environmental issue on par with saving the ozone layer, the reality is that the way we deal with the material world is at the root of all the issues deemed more noteworthy, from resource depletion and toxic air& water pollution to environmental justice, soil/food quality, and the biggie, climate change. By dumping, burning, and otherwise taking precious materials out of their natural cycles, we are disrupting the very mechanisms by which life on Earth is made possible.
To put it more bluntly, our buying, consuming and throwing away an ever growing number of industrially produced and packaged things is trashing our own nest.
Which one of these would you like to soon throw away, son?
Throwing away precious resources is not just an environmental issue. In Mississippi, where fewer than one in five people recycle and only around half of residents even have access to a community recycling program in their area, $210 million a year worth of materials is thrown in the garbage and $70 million spent to bury it in landfills. In vast parts of the U.S., even if you would like to treat your used materials with more respect, there's no infrastructure for it.
A 2011 Ipsos poll found the top barrier to recycling for Americans is it’s not convenient where they live. That’s exacerbated in a rural state like Mississippi, where the nearest bin might be 50 or more miles away.
Clearly, something has gone awry in the modern American mindset that we would not only accept this glaring imbalance on our ecological spreadsheet but choose to throw away billions of dollars worth of precious materials.
So you're going to bury these in a big hole in the ground. Really?
The question is, why would we do something as irrational as trashing the planetand missing a great opportunity to boost the economy?
The answer, luckily, is not as complex as one might think.
In Mississippi, the two biggest obstacles are access and education — and it’s not at all clear which is the chicken and which is the egg.
In other words:
- Chicken: People don't recycle and compost because there's no infrastructure that makes it easy to do so.
- Egg: There's no recycling and composting infrastructure because people don't understand the benefits of it and thus there's no demand.
As so often with these dilemmas, it's hardly ever one or the other, but usually a little bit of both. In this case, it's probably fair to say that a good municipal recycling and composting program goes a long way in creating a citizenry that recycles and composts, just as a public that's educated about waste issues is more likely to lobby their representatives for better recycling facilities.
No matter how far a city or region has come in their resource recovery efforts, making a serious move towards zero waste on a broad national and international scale can only be accomplished if a new generation of citizens can learn to internalize the consciousness and habits required to keep valuable materials out of landfills and incinerators.
America Recycles Day is one such learning opportunity, as I witnessed first hand at Davis Street Resource Complex in San Leandro, CA a couple of weeks ago.
Follow me below the orange wiggler for a few impressions from that day. May they shed some light on how more Americans might be led to proclaim:
How I Learned to Stop Wasting and Love the Trash