A Wasteful World I magine what would happen if nobody took your garbage away What would it be like if day after day week after week your trash piled up in your house and front yard Pretty soon you would be wading through plastic bottles and paper bags and rotting food It would look terrible and the smell would be worse If we don’t control the amount of waste we throw away this situation might actually happen We live in a very wasteful world Almost everything we do creates waste Everything we buy everything we eat and everything we use all produces waste that has to be disposed of in some way As the population of the world grows the amount of garbage produced increases too The problem is not just that our society produces more waste today than ever before but it is also doing it at a greater rate Today we produce three times as much waste as we did in the 1960s A strike by garbage removal workers in Leeds England in October 2009 shows what city streets look like after just a few weeks when refuse piles up (cid:23)
The large volumes of garbage we make creates not just a disposal problem but is also a huge waste of natural resources Unless things can be reused or recycled everything we throw away has to be produced again out of new materials More trees have to be cut down to make paper more oil has to be refined to make plastic Prevention of waste is a better solution than even the best way of disposing of it Disposal of garbage has become critical throughout the world Where does the garbage come from How do we get rid of it How can we reduce the amount of it Finding ways to deal with the garbage we produce is one of the major problems facing the world today A large proportion of our garbage is disposed of in landfill sites But landfill is an ugly polluting and environmentally unfriendly way to dispose of waste
Domestic Waste M any people buy a daily newspaper drink cola from an aluminum can or coffee from a polystyrene cup All these things are used once and then thrown away Inside the Trash Can If we look at the waste an average household produces you will see that the largest amount comes from leftover food and garden waste After this paper and cardboard are the biggest contributors More than half of this comes from newspapers and magazines Much of our garbage is plastic packaging and bottles and glass bottles and jars which makes up nearly one-quarter of our waste This piechart shows the proportions of the types of garbage produced in an average household 6
So Where Does It All Go Most people put their garbage into plastic bags and place the bag in a trash can Then it is picked up by a garbage truck Some waste products such as paper glass plastic metal and garden waste can be recycled and these are collected separately In most countries the majority of waste that cannot be recycled is sent to landfill This means it is buried in the ground Some is incinerated which means it is burned Dealing with our garbage in this way is not a very good solution When we bury or burn waste we are polluting the land and atmosphere Most landfill sites are nearly full and we are running out of land for new sites The U S is the world’s top garbage-producing country On average each person produces 1,610 pounds 730 kg of garbage every year This means a family of four will produce more than 3 tons of garbage a year Every nation needs to find ways of reducing the amount of waste they produce recycling more of it and disposing of what is left over more carefully In most residential areas household waste is picked up and taken away by garbage collectors Most of it is disposed of in landfill sites or incinerated 7
