2.6 trillion Pounds of garbage. That’s the amount of trash the world will produce just this year. How much garbage does an average American go through yearly compared to other countries? How does this affect people’s lives and our future? If we could only reuse, reduce, and recycle; just these three simple things and we can start our journey to a cleaner, healthier, and happier planet.
The average American tends to go through 4.6 pounds of trash a day, 1,675 a year. That’s 600 times their body weight. Every day Americans throw away enough garbage to fill 63,000 garbage trucks. From all that garbage, half can be recycled. That is enough to fill a football stadium from top to bottom every day. Europeans produce 16 metric tons (35,274 pounds)
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With it being 200 feet deep and 300 acres wide it contains around 50 million tons of waste. The trash that Sin City produces ends up here. All 9,000 tons of it. There are many landfills across the world, but the earth’s biggest are located mostly in the United States, or near it. Puente Hills Landfill in Los Angeles, California is so big that it is being brought down because of security hazards to workers. It is 700 acres wide and 500 feet high. There are more than 15,000 tons of garbage brought in each day and it holds more than 3.7 million tons. Bord Poniento …show more content…
That is the case in Lagos State, Nigeria. The Lagos Dumpsite is 1,000 acres as of today, with 10,000 tons of solid waste per day. The Sudokwon Landfill in South Korea contains roughly 88 million tons of waste. That averages 20,000 tons per day or 6.3 million tons per year. Another large landfill is in the North Pacific Ocean. The Great Pacific garbage Patch is the world’s largest landfill. It is also known as the Pacific Trash Vortex. It extends from the west coast of North America all the way to Japan. Of all the waste that accumulates here, 80% of it is trash that comes from the land. 20% of the waste comes from boats, oil rigs, and enormous cargo ships that dump or lose rubble into the
The North Pacific Gyre, home to the north pacific Garbage Patch, occupies the zone of the subtropical High between Haeaii and California. It is the largest and best studied of the gyress, though still fraught with unknowns. It is thought to be the trashiest, though this question is still being studied. Covering more than 20 million square miles, it is the largest on earth and therefor the planet’s largest garbage dumps. (Humes, 2012, p.
Landfills have been around for a long time. They have been used to get rid of our garbage so we don’t have to figure out how. Some think landfills are still a good idea. However there are many people that think landfills are harmful to us. There are other things that we in the United States can do to help with removal of our garbage or waste besides send it to the landfills. So closing down landfills would be a good idea or we could close down as many as we can. To be able to get rid of the landfills Americans need to learn more about composting, recycling and incineration as other forms of waste removal.
Landfills in America have taken many square miles of what used to be fertile land, forests and communities and that trend does not seem to have an end. The waste, we as Americans, dispose of each year is in the tons and that number rises annually. One of the reasons why this occurs is actually quite simple; population. Population in modern day America has soared to well above three hundred million, in 1915 that number was hundred million. Urbanization and industry has given way to deforestation and landfill creation. The need for more landfills has caused many health concerns, issues, and problems to not only those living near and
originally been discarded on land” ( Weisman.) Moore estimated that the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” alone has roughly three million tons of plastic waste in it, and has grown by 100 percent over the past 40 years. It’s crazy to think we are polluting the only home humans have; filling the oceans of the world carelessly with waste.
One person's rubbish really is another person's livelihood at the 30 acre landfill to the east of the city, which is one of the largest dumpsites in the world.
Plastic has an extreme impact on the environment. Trash, consisting of paper or organic waste, decomposes after a while, unlike plastic in which one plastic bottle takes from 450 up to 1000 years to decompose. Considering that the United States produces over 300 million tons of plastic a year, most of which is only used once and then thrown away, it is clear that pollution will become worse each year. It becomes even more shocking when this number is put in other terms; 300 million tons of plastic is comparable to the weight of all the adults living on the planet. By not
An important part of recycling is conservation. Conservation helps keep unneeded waste out of landfills in the United States (Conserve Energy Future 2). As Americans, an average person throws away 4.8 pounds of waste daily. This adds up to over 1750 pounds in a year alone, for one person. In 2006, Americans generated 251 tons of waste (Riedel 11). Of this waste over 50 percent could be recycled into new materials to be used again. In doing this, recycling will tremendously
Silverman, Jacob. “Why is the world’s biggest landfill in the Pacific Ocean?” How Stuff Works. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.
To begin with, in the U.S., trash is most commonly sent to a landfill, unfortunately though, once it arrives there little sorting occurs. According to the EPA, “Nationally, food is the single most common material sent to landfills. When excess food, leftover food, and food scraps are disposed of in a landfill, they decompose and become a significant source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas” (“Cupertino Honored”). At a landfill, trash arriving is only screened for liquids in order to avoid the creation of leachate, or water that is contaminated from dissolved chemicals in garbage. Once screened, dumped, and covered, bacteria begin to decompose the trash and, as a result, release methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The fact is that landfills are ideally supposed to be used to bury garbage that is non-decomposable, however, with the garbage collection method that is currently in place across many states, all unsorted garbage is being sent there. In addition, “...traditional trash disposal not only wastes material that can enrich soil but accelerates climate change. Organic matter decom...
She suggests that Americans should reduce their overconsumption of such commodities since they are overburdening the non-biodegradable waste load in the garbage collection facilities. It is surprising to note that every Americans disposes more than four pounds of trash on a daily basis (Royte, 2005).
Around the world, about 245 million tons of plastic is produced yearly. This figure represents a whopping 70 pounds of plastic thrown annually for each of the 7.1 billion people on the planet. The sad news is that of these 245 million tons of plastic per year, around 4.7 million tons of plastic garbage gathers in vast floating oval-shaped ocean garbage patches.
Everybody throws away trash with little or no thought about where it’s going. What you might not know is that a lot of trash goes into our ocean. You may think it is not a big deal and that it’s just a little bit of trash in a really big ocean, but it’s not just a little bit of trash. In fact, it’s a whole lot. There is a place between California and Hawaii called the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, but is better known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. This area is the largest landfill in the world and is completely in the ocean. What are the effects of the landfill on the environment and how can it be prevented and rehabilitated to its original state?
The United States produces “about 8.25 billion tons of solid wastes each year” (Russell 1). People do not realize the impact they have on our planet and environment. When people throw anything in the trashcan, they are contributing to the destruction of our planet. The number landfills in the United States are decreasing, but the amount and volume of waste being thrown into the new landfills is increasing (Russell 4). Because of this escalating amount of garbage, Methane which contributes to global warming is an outcome of these landfills (Russell 7). As a result, our planet is suffering because of this epidemic. The garbage being put in the landfills could be recycled, but not enough businesses, ...
America and Europe are at the top of the list for most waste generated according to Waste (4). This is very visible because there’s litter on every street in the towns and cities, as well in lakes, beaches, and rivers. The book Waste by Rob Bowden states that the amount of waste produced is increasing at a rate faster than population growth. About 1.5 million computers, in the U.K, are thrown away each year and most end up in landfills. There are 3 types of waste which are Municipal Solid Waste, Industrial Waste, and Hazardous waste. MSW includes waste from public garbage cans and local dumpsters. Industrial Waste includes massive amounts of waste water that is contaminated with chemicals. Hazardous waste is the most dangerous as it presents a danger to human health and the environment. Solutions for waste disposal take time because people need to consider their lifestyle and limit the amount of waste they generate. A good start is to recycle items such as paper, cans, plastic, and clothes. This way they don’t end up in landfills, beaches, or streets. Another solution is to join organizations that go around places to recycle, or organizations that demand the reduction in the amount of products that are being
The average resident produces seven and a half pounds of garbage every day that is buried down in landfills and litters lands costing a great amount of money. Nowadays, people face no more critical trouble than the need to save the weakening environment, mainly in urban areas, where solid wastes are uselessly dumped. It has been observed that cities have no controlled structure for garbage disposal. Each year, millions of dollars are spent picking up litter and more is thrown away in valuable materials that could be recycled. As humanity develops new technology and equipment, the level of waste increases every day. Due to the fact that there is a huge problem with garbage disposal, government representatives must contribute to resolving this issue.