Every day people all over the world generate waste and then look for something to do with it. Trash gets thrown in lakes, tossed onto train tracks, sorted into recycling bins, taken off to a dump, tied up in bags, burnt in fields, and tossed onto the the bosses desk after hours. Trash and garbage are everywhere, so if you?ve ever wondered, or just want to impress your friends with your waste knowledge, here are some shocking facts about garbage, trash removal, and our recycling:
- The average human being creates four pounds of waste every day, That?s 28 pounds a week and 1,460 pounds a year! What are you doing with all that?
- Americans throw away about 600 times their adult weight in garbage in the course of their lifetime. Just imagine if we called for some recycling services to take care of that, rather than just tossing it all. And then, why not try to imagine using a bit less in the first place?
- The United States spends around $11.5 billion every year cleaning up litter. Litter is the waste we?re just tossing out car windows and dropping haphazardly from our hands while drifting down the sidewalk. What?s the takeaway from this fact? Easy. Stop it!
- There are often as many as 20 different industries involved in some aspect of a community?s waste management or other. That?s a lot of different jobs sorting, recycling, collecting, transporting, compacting, and otherwise managing a huge amount of waste every day.
- The United Nations Centre for Human Settlements has a shocking stat: worldwide only about 25% to 55% of the waste in big cities is collected by the municipality. America is actually doing a pretty good job, comparatively, of taking responsibility to clean up after itself. Don?t rest on your laurels, though. Read on for more about recycling.
- It costs $50 a ton to send trash and garbage to the landfill, and about $30 a ton to recycle it. Either way, it adds up after a while, but at the amounts we generate, $20 a ton savings isn?t anything to sneeze out. Plus, recycling means some aspect of an item is used again, saving more down the line.
- Speaking of recycling, recycling one ton of cardboard keeps a whole nine cubic yards of landfill space from getting eaten up. That leaves more space for the stuff that actually can?tbe recycled. It also saves money, and it?s just good sense.
There you have it: amazing facts about waste and all we do with it. So see if you can?t cut down a bit on how much you generate; and make sure the waste you do make you take care of right.