Everyone buys things and sooner or later, we will throw it away. Or suppose we eat at Mc Donald's. After we are finished, we throw away our trash and never see or think of it ever again. In our fast passed world that we live in today, there are many people living in it and produce a lot of garbage and waste. The United States alone produces over 200 million tons of Municipal Solid Waste every year. That is equates to about 4.5 pounds of waste per person, per day. According to data from the EPA, about 35% of that is paper, 30% include yard trimmings and food scraps. Over 11% is plastic, 8% is metal, and the remainder contains wood, rubber, glass, and textiles. The main problem that we have is overflow of landfills. On top of this problem, there is a factor of contamination and pollution that carries on with garbage disposal. Because of this dilemma, we need solutions to these problems. Some solutions include recycling, source reduction, and other methods of waste disposal. In this proposal, I will talk briefly about waste management and how landfills are made and developed. I will further discuss governmental regulations that are taking place to make disposal safe and friendly to the environment.
About 27 percent of the trash is recycled, 16 percent is burned, and 57 percent is buried in landfills. A landfill by definition is a carefully designed structure built into or on top of the ground in which trash is isolated from the surrounding environment. This isolation is made possible with a bottom liner and covering of soil. Most landfills use a synthetic plastic liner to isolate the trash from the environment. In a landfill, not all of the land is used for dumping trash. Some areas are used for runoff collecti...
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...ed. That means there are still recyclable materials that are being buried or burned at dump sites. This causes the possibly recyclable material to be dumped in landfills. The current practice of burying waste is not a good solution for today's needs and for the future. As the amount of municipal solid waste grows year by year, our way of life is going to determine the life style of the future.
Implementation by the government or extra funding for recycling by the government can be a solution to the overflow of trash and garbage in municipal solid waste landfills. The solution is not found in making landfills larger and not necessarily forming innovative procedures to handling waste. Further incentives for recycling or source reduction can lower solid wastes that end up in landfills, which in turn will make the world and environment a better place to live.
In conclusion to this investigation one thing is clear and that is that recycling reeks benefits to the environment, Recycling material when compared to making material from raw material is a more efficient energy saving and more environmentally friendly way to reuse material that is usually consider as trash such as empty glass, and plastic bottles, or old newspapers. Recycling helps reduce the possible carbon emissions greatly and does reduce the human carbon footprint. But Recycling doesn’t resolve the pollution that is around the world today. Leading to new questions, questions like what about the landfills are they sustainable, and if so for how long. How long until the air becomes unbreathable? How long until Earth becomes its own furnace?
Harmful emissions from the landfills escape into the air we breathe. The soil and water are also contaminated from our
A landfill is a place where garbage is deposited and buried. It is also called as disposal site. A disposal site is the place where solid waste such as paper, glass and metal are buried between a layers of dirt with other materials in order to reduce contamination of surrounding land. Landfills may include internal waste disposal sites where waste producers carries out their own waste disposal at
Waste management is the operation of how waste materials are handled. The affair of waste management is relevant to everyone world-wide. Wastes are materials that have no further economic use, and when disposed of, are hazardous to humans and the environment. Wastes include solid waste, liquid wastes, and air pollutants created by humans and cannot be naturally recycled. Current waste management techniques need to be completely overhauled because funding in government budget is not enough to meet standards, landfills are reaching their maximum capacity worldwide, and nuclear waste storage must be handled correctly. Waste management has been a highly thought about complication for global authorities. Due to
Reduce, recycle and recycle could be a construct that individuals area unit beginning to perceive and to use to each life round the world (GOV.UK, 2013). This knowledge base essay can explore info concerning use by totally different resources that are provided to use such as the web, books, journals and alternative resources that needs to offer American state info on use. This essay can discover use as business, environmental and policy perspective. Use is that the methodology by that we tend to recover valuable resources to be re-used once more and once more. However just one a part of healing the atmosphere, it's a sensible action that people altogether businesses participate in daily routines on recycling (Reclaim, 2013). While recycling is only one part to healing the environment it is a practical action that individuals in all businesses and people take part in every day.
To implement a recycling program requires a collection process that includes the containers to gather the materials, the trucks to transport them to the processing site, and the manpower to manage the program. Unfortunately, recycling is more of a business than an attempt to save the environment. The value of the material being recycled overshadows the negative impact of dumping items into the landfill. At a point in time, the demand for recycled paper declined, so recyclers stored the material in hopes that values would increase. “The hope is that eventually the markets turn around and that the materials is sold, but I have heard of instances where it gets landfilled, because a community doesn’t have the demand or the space or the company to deal with it, “ says Gene Jones, the executive director of Southern Waste Information Exchange (Westervelt,
When addressing this issue, it is necessary to discuss the cost of curbside recycling, which outweighs any economic gains. Second, it must be made known that the recycling process wastes more natural sources than it saves. For these three reasons --economic, environmental, and experiential—curbside recycling should ...
In the 1870’s, plastic was discovered in the United States when John Wesley Hyatt was trying to create a different material to make billiard balls (Manrich, 3). Little did he know it would majorly evolve into material we use everyday. However, plastics are now taking over our landfills. The average American throws away one-hundred and eighty-five pounds of plastic a year (Popescu, 121). The answer to decrease this statistic is easy: recycling. I believe that recycling will help eliminate littering and the growth of landfills, while also creating jobs for the unemployed. Not only does recycling plastic help eliminate littering, but also reuses the plastic so there is not a production of additional unneeded plastics. The
Way that we can keep from landfill runoff from leaking into the ocean is to reduce oil, grease, and metals from going into the ground and leaking into the storm drains. Another way we can reduce runoff from getting from the land to the ocean is to keep and clean septic tank and keep it from leaking especially if u live right by and water source that lead straight to the ocean. Almost 25% of trash we go through goes down the drain into the ocean. We can also keep landfills from leaking into the ocean is to keeps landfills into contained areas and keep landfills from overgrowth. Also a way to keep the overgrowth of landfills is shipping trash from Hawaii. About 200,000 pounds of trash is shipped out of Hawaii every
Policy is needed to regulate which course of action should be taken and how it should be implemented. Because of this, many plans and policies revolving around the management of solid waste have been put in place. Sometimes however, a particular policy can have its shortfalls, potentially resulting in its negative aspects outweighing the positive ones. According to the Conference Board of Canada Report, “Canadians dispose of more municipal solid waste per capita than any other country” (2013). Solid waste management in particular, involves many aspects, ranging from packaging waste, food waste, etc. (White & Franke 1999), hence, the following analysis revolves around household and commercial waste – referred to as Municipal Solid Waste (White & Franke. 1999) – in the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Municipal waste is a major health and environmental concern as it contributes to numerous problems like habitat destruction, surface groundwater pollution, and other forms of air, soil, and water contamination. Waste disposal methods like incineration create toxic substances, and landfills emit methane, which contributes to global warming. According to the Zero Waste Objective Report, “The impact of climate change and the increasing awareness of the role of “waste” and “wasting” in the production of greenhouse gas emissions is a constant environmental pressure… (2009). This leads to an increasing limitation of government to prevent and control the volume and toxicity of products in the waste stream and a growing need to shift responsibility to the product manufacturer.
Traditional methods of waste disposal have proven to be ineffective and have caused harmful effects on the environment. The most popular and inexpensive way to get rid of garbage is burial, but burying your problems does not necessarily mean getting rid of them. Landfill sites pose as severe ecological threats as these mass garbage dump yards overflow with trash and frequently contaminate our air, soil and water with hazardous wastes. About 400 million tons of hazardous wastes are generated each year1. A large-scale release of these materials can cause thousands of deaths and may poison the environment for many years. For example many industrial companies around the world cannot afford to enforce the strict pollution regulations set by many developed countries. This usually forces these types of companies to move to developing countries where pollution regulations are very lenient. These developing countries knowingly accept environmentally hazardous companies usually because they are in desperate need of employment. The harmful effects of these companies were clearly illustrated in the 1960s and 1970s when residents living near Minamata Bay, Japan, developed nervous disorders, tremors, and paralysis in a mysterious epidemic. The root was later found to be a local industry that had released mercury, a highly toxic element, into Minamata Bay. The disaster had claimed the lives of 400 people1. Since 1970 you can bet that a lot more than 400 people have died as a result of waste disposal. If the type of waste disposal were cheaper and effective we wouldn’t have to deal with waste problems, which still plague mankind today.
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, ...
Recycling is important in the effort to preserve our environment for future generations. We are running out of locations to put landfills. Recycling is a simple and effective way to reduce the amount of waste stored in landfills, yet many people do not know how easy it can be. For example, whenever I go to Shoprite® and I b...
Row, J., (2010). Pros and cons of incineration for landfill relief. Bright Hub. Retrieved: November 11, 2010, from: http://www.brighthub.com/engineering/civil/articles/89810.aspx
Wastes are the products of our consumptions in our daily life routines such as lunch, work, school and other things we do. Little things such as throwing out a piece of paper, we are producing waste by the seconds. After we consume a product we usually throw out what’s left that can’t be consumed any further. Results in producing waste, substance that are born after it’s been use or consume by us. At the end of each day we throw out a bag full of garbage, all of the materials in that bag (paper towels, cans, leftover foods and many other material’s) all of these are waste. Hospitals produce medical waste such as use needles for treating patients. Corporations produce papers, plastics, tires, steels, cans and many other type of solid waste which contribute to the pollutions that cause health risk and other environmental issues.