Trash Talk

The Hard Facts About Garbage

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Unless you're artist Stuart Haygarth trash just isn't pretty. An average American home tosses out 34 pounds of trash per week. All together, American homes send 100 million tons of trash to landfills each year. Just transporting and processing all that that garbage emits the CO2 equivalent of 42 million cars on the road; that's 220 million tons of CO2 every year! And the reality is that 75% of that garbage could either be composted or recycled.

First, the good news: Americans are getting better about recycling. We now recycle about 1/3 of our waste. But according to the EPA we could do a whole lot better. Let's start by looking at what's contained in a typical trash bag.

A full 33% of our trash is paper, which is easily recycled. When tossed in a landfill, paper creates methane during decomposition, a greenhouse gas that's 21x worse than CO2. Another 25% of our trash is green waste, which can easily be composted right at home. Another quarter of trash is recyclable materials like glass, plastic and metal.

And don't forget about all those trash bags. The State of California reports that bags alone represent 1% of solid waste, which equals 1 million tons of plastic. By recycling all the listed materials, you can reduce your trash burden by 75%, which drops your Total Environmental Impact TEI by 3 percentage points. That's a huge contribution to the environment.