By Katrina Huang
I asked a local resident her opinion on how people separate their trash. “People just don’t really know how . . . there’s different ways to address unwillingness versus not knowing,” she responded. So, how can we address this commonly overlooked topic?
Well, why is sorting our trash important?
Statistically, the average American throws out about 4.9 pounds of trash every day. Expanding that to the American population, we generated about 292 million tons of solid waste in 2018 alone. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 75 percent of our landfill waste can be recycled. Of all the waste we generate, however, we only recycle about less than a quarter.
It’s important that we minimize the amount of waste left in landfills. For example, decomposing food scraps, yard trimmings, and soiled paper, when deposited in landfills, produce methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas at least 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in our atmosphere, which means that it is a huge contributor to climate change. Landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, which is why it’s so important that apart from reducing and reusing our waste, we make sure it is sorted efficiently.
One of the most common misconceptions I see with regard to waste is the assumption that our trash facilities process and sort all of our waste for us, regardless of what bin we put our trash in. In truth, whatever we put into our trash (landfill) bin does not get sorted or processed whatsoever. When plastic waste or other items that can be reused or repurposed are dumped into landfill, plastic items will take up to 1000 years to decompose. To reduce your waste, donate edible food to local food closets and offer items you no longer need to be distributed for free on, for example, local Buy Nothing groups.
A second common misconception is about the process of recycling. Recyclable materials must be clean, or something called recycling contamination occurs. In this process, non-recyclable or unclean substances mix with the recyclable materials, rendering the usable materials caught in the mix useless. In fact, just a bit of grease can ruin otherwise usable batches of material. Contaminated recycling must undergo further processing and is commonly disposed of.
So . . . what are some pointers for proper trash sorting?
Print out and hang a guide like this one over your household or building cans and bins! Resources like this are extremely helpful and are already on most community trash bins. Sparing them a glance whenever you’re unsure of where to throw something goes a long way.
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