My last article(s) dealt with batteries and their importance as a step towards a greener future. I ended the article with this paragraph:

We the Consumer…

And as the simple consumer of at the end of all this battery production and technological advancements… What can we do? We can recycle. We can promote recycling locally. We can insist on buying recycled materials, not just recycled battery and technology parts, but recycled glass, metals, fabrics, wood products. A Green Future is not just in energy production, but in better waste management as well. “After a century of heavy industrial activity, we also have a wealth of human waste products full of reclaimable elements: wastewater, discarded consumer electronics and even pollution in the atmosphere. Technologies that scientists are developing to clean up these wastes can literally turn trash into treasure. “If you’re going to remove it, why not recover it?””

The Question of Trash Management

The question for this article deals with just how much trash we put out and are we making the most of waste management, specifically sorting and recycling… Because if there is a finite amount of metals to be mined for our batteries, it would be a safe guess that there is a finite amount of land space for our trash.

How Much Trash?

The amount of trash, or municipal solid waste, generated here in the United States in 2018, per person, was 2.58 kg/day… That’s 5.7 lbs/day for those of us not comfortable with metric. That would be the equivalent of throwing away your mother’s Yorkie each day. Or 3 gallons of milk. Or a 24” TV. Just trying to put this into perspective. Even if we go with the EPA 2018 number of 4.9 lbs per person, that still adds up 35 lbs per week, or 149 lbs of trash per month FROM ONE PERSON. If you live with someone, double that. If your live in a family of four, quadruple that.

Now let’s make this a visual representation…

Imagine, if you would, that the trash you generate in a month is an “adult”, or better yet, an adult sized mannequin. We’ll round this up to 150 lbs. Now imagine that you lived outside of town and had no trash service. You have a busy life, and you let your mannequins pile up. That would be 12 mannequins piled up against your house, or wherever you put your trash, in just a year’s time. That is 1800 lbs of trash. Almost one ton. Now add a family of four; that’s 7200 lbs. And this is just ONE family. I won’t extend this out, but I hope I am getting my point across.

According to the EPA, in 2018 the United States generated 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste – trash. Where exactly does all that trash go?

Where Does Our Trash Go?

Over half of our trash goes to landfills. Land. Land that cannot be farmed. Land that is not in it’s natural state with the local flora and fauna, so it cannot be enjoyed by “getting outdoors” in a natural setting. Land that cannot have homes on it. Land.

“Landfills are designed to store waste, but not to break it down. They are made up of layers lined with clay and covered in a flexible plastic skin. Drains and pipes crisscross each layer to collect the contaminated fluid created by garbage. As a layer fills, it is covered with another sheet of plastic and [finally] topped with soil and plants. Eventually, garbage will decompose in a landfill, but the process is slow in this oxygen-free environment.” So, landfills take up land space and are not “quick” in the decomposition of trash.

When a landfill is “closed” and covered for the last time, the area is given time to stabilize and settle. “Upon stabilization, some landfill sites are used as parks, playgrounds, golf courses, or other facilities. Both John F. Kennedy and La Guardia Airports were built on landfills.” Please note the use of the word “some” landfills, not all. For any interested, the rules governing the environmentally safe maintenance, placement and closing of a landfill can be found here.

Therefore landfills are not the best method of waste management due to slow rate of waste decomposition, land use and potential for environmental pollution from waste within the landfill.

Recycle and Reuse

What else do we do with our trash? “Roughly 35% of all solid waste goes to either a recycling or composting facility. The goal of both recycling and composting is to reuse waste by turning it into new products. Recycling facilities generally focus on processing aluminum, plastics, paper and glass, while composters use food and agricultural waste to create compost for municipal and consumer use.”

Recycling While Traveling…

From my own personal experience, there seems to be quite a bit of variance on recycling from state to state. I’ve recently been able to do a little traveling and in the last year or two, I have been across our great country. One thing stood out in my travels. Recycling, or the lack thereof.

Having lived in the Pacific Northwest, recycling is big. You pay a recycle fee on bottles and cans to ensure that if you don’t recycle it, someone else will. I’m sure, if you look, you’ve seen those fees listed on your favorite drink and what states charge them. Where I was at, they even set up a neat system; where instead of a monetary exchange for your bag of recyclables, you were given a card/ID number that you could then use as cash at any participating store. Kind of easy.

What I found as I traveled through the Midwest was that there was little to no recycling. My trash was dumped in a single can, no separation. Now some areas do have recycling, but even that seemed rather simplified consisting of a two can system with trash and recyclables. In the Pacific Northwest, I lived in an HOA where we had four cans: the big trash dumpster, a glass can, a recycle can and a compost can. This made more sense as it encourages the easy recycling of the traditional glass, tin, aluminum, cardboard, etc. But I will acknowledge that I lived in a metropolis and the set up for collecting all these items was easy. Smaller cities and rural areas would have a much harder time setting up a recycling program.

No Recycling Option?

Since the purpose of this article is “making the most of waste management”, what do you do if you live in an area that is not user-friendly for recycling?

This aspect of “greener living” will require a bit of dedication on your part, but it can be done! If your area had a pre-existing recycling system, then with dedicated local effort and time, you might be able to resurrect the recycling program. This may require a change in the local taxes to support the costs, but in the long term of a greener future, it would be worth it. If you had no pre-existing recycling system, you may have to get creative with other like-minded individuals.

Online Resources:

Here are two sites that provide ideas on how to set up a recycling system from the ground up.

Model Recycling Program Toolkit | US EPA “an interactive collection of EPA and other materials. Toolkit materials can help states, territories, local governments, tribes, schools, nonprofit organizations, companies, and public-private partnerships create effective programs for recycling, composting, anaerobic digestion, reuse, repair and waste reduction. Materials in the toolkit can help communities increase participation in recycling programs and reduce contamination in the recycling stream.”

How to Help Bring a Recycling Program to Your Town – Green Oklahoma This is written from a local grassroots/citizen inspired point of view.

If you enjoyed the show Portlandia, then this link will provide a little humor, as well as a funny example of the pitfalls of extremism. Which bin does it go in? – YouTube

Recycling, then, is a good form of “green” waste management; but in its current state, it is limited by the local waste programs, the methods used within the local waste program and by individual participation of the “waste generator”, i.e. you.

A Detailed Look at Our Trash

For a deeper understanding of the breadth of waste management, let’s look at some specific types of trash sources not normally found in your kitchen trash can.

Fast Fashion and Textile Waste generates an estimated 92 million tonnes of textiles waste every year. “The fast fashion model drives consumers to continuously purchase cheap clothing and discard them quickly due to its poor quality, which are significantly more susceptible to wear and tear. This cycle of buying and discarding creates a huge environmental problem, with the world accumulating mountains of textile and clothing waste every day, most of which are not biodegradable.”

“We generate around 40 million tons of electronic waste every year, worldwide. That’s like throwing [away] 800 laptops every second. An average cellphone user replaces their unit once every 18 months. E-waste comprises 70% of our overall toxic waste, and only 12.5% of E-Waste is recycled.”

“According to the EPA, furniture waste generated by Americans in 2017 totaled a staggering12.2 million tons, and 80.2% of it went to landfill. The agency also found that only 0.3% of the f-waste that was sent to landfill was recovered for recycling. To make matters worse, furniture waste doesn’t include items like carpets and rugs, of which Americans threw away an additional 3.4 million tons in 2017.”

And lastly? “Approximately 17 million new passenger vehicles will hit the roads in 2021 while another 27 million cars worldwide reach their final destination of the great car park in the sky. Made from over 30,000 different parts, every automobile comes with a lot of hazardous and non-hazardous car waste.”

This is a large variety of waste to manage. And it is a medley of toxic and non-toxic materials. Therefore proper waste management is important not just because of landfill space and recycling limitations, but because of the other methods of waste management that are used.

Trash Incineration

“Trash incinerators are large industrial furnaces designed to burn municipal solid waste. They process 12.8% of national MSW. The primary combustion chambers of these facilities operate at a blistering 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to turn any amount of trash into ash. This process reduces the original volume of waste by 95%, significantly reducing the amount of landfill space needed. Incinerating MSW also produces surplus heat that can be used to generate both heat and electricity.” Countries that have less land available tend to use trash incineration more.

If you wish to see if you have a biomass incinerator in your area, you can see the different types of power plants in the US here.

This reinforces what I wrote about in my last article, Batteries in Our “Green” Future. Because of the toxic materials found in our personal technology, the various used batteries, the petroleum-based materials we use to manufacture needed items with, or any of the other various materials used in manufacturing; the incineration of poorly sorted waste leads to toxic materials being released into the air.

Trash incineration greatly reduces the amount of solid (ash) waste that would then be put into a landfill, and can provide heat to generate energy by. But the downside of incineration is the potential of toxins being released into the air.

Composting on a Large Scale

And the last method of waste management is anaerobic digestion; composting on a large scale. This method is “another form of waste-to-energy conversion… a biological process using microorganisms to turn organic materials into energy and fertilizer. This process takes place in large tanks called anaerobic digesters. They’re most commonly found on farms, where organic waste is readily available, though some accept food waste from restaurants, grocery stores and even entire communities. Wastewater treatment plants also use digesters to produce energy for the local power grid. Instead of using food or agricultural waste as a feedstock, wastewater facilities use organics-rich sewage.”

These composting systems have some definite advantages. “Decomposition and biological stabilization of the waste in a bioreactor landfill (aka anaerobic digester) can occur in a much shorter time than in a traditional “dry tomb” landfill. This can provide a potential decrease in long-term environmental risks and landfill operating and post-closure costs.” A few of the advantages of the anaerobic digester system is a15 – 30% gain in landfill space due to an increase in the density of waste mass and a significant increase in LFG (landfill gas/methane) generation that can be used for energy use onsite or sold.

Composting then allows for faster decomposition of waste, creating lower overall management costs and greater/faster stability of land, with the added bonus of an energy source from the waste decomposition.

Landfills are “Storage Units”

It would seem, then, that the simple “dumping of trash” at the local landfill is not the best management of our waste, and is certainly not the greenest method available. It’s just the easiest, plus we have the land space… For now. Recycling can provide us with profitable products that can then be used and reused multiple times. Items that already get recycled easily are glass, paper and cardboard, aluminum and steel cans, and some plastics. Large scale composting facilities, like the bioreactors or anaerobic digestors, make usable fertilizer and a heat/methane source that can be used as an energy source or sold. Even trash incineration, if the trash source is well sorted, i.e. clean, can provide energy for our electric power grids and the ash remains are five percent of the original mass, taking up far less space in landfills. Landfills, by comparison, are simply storage units.

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure

There are so many other things we could be “doing” with our trash, rather then letting it slowly rot in the ground. As I quoted from the last article “After a century of heavy industrial activity, we also have a wealth of human waste products full of reclaimable elements: wastewater, discarded consumer electronics and even pollution in the atmosphere. Technologies that scientists are developing to clean up these wastes can literally turn trash into treasure.” Recapturing phosphorus from waste water to use in fertilizers, urban mining for the metals in e-waste and even turning CO2 in the atmosphere back into methanol. These are green methods that we could all benefit from and make a profit from.

We the Consumer…

Have Buying Power

So I ask again: how can we, the consumer, help these new greener waste management technologies along? By only buying recycled and repurposed products. Only buy things that can be composted, such as products made from cotton, hemp or bamboo. We do have “power”, our buying power, in this capitalistic society. Trends come and go. Why? Because we, the consumer, buy the things we want. That gives us some say, not only in what is produced but in how it is produced.

Can Sort Our Trash

What else can we, the consumer do? Take a more active part in our own waste management. Sort your trash, clean out the dirty recyclables before you put them in the recycle bin. Compost for your garden, mulch your leaves. Try to participate in better waste management so we don’t have to worry about running out of landfill space or the pollutants from landfills and incinerators affecting our neighborhoods.

Can Keep Things Longer

And last? Stop buying single use or cheaply made items. Buy clothes that are designed to last. It would be better for your pocketbook as well. Don’t get a new phone “just because”… Keep it for awhile. Again, it would be cheaper. I realize that there is a time and place for single use items: camping, parties, holidays… But the REDUCE, in the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is first because it is our shopping and trashing habits that create the huge amounts of waste that end up in our landfills. Keeping things longer or re-purposing them if possible, is cheaper in the long run… Which helps out the pocketbook as well as the environment.

A Green Future is not just in energy production, but in better waste management as well. And this is something that we can all do together, here “at home” and abroad.