Your Trash!

Hello all and welcome to educational Monday. What am I going to educate you about today? Garbage!  Uh…what is there to know about garbage that we don’t already know? I mean, what is important about it really? We go to the grocery store and buy our meats, snacks, and other items that are conveniently wrapped in plastic. We do whatever it is that we need to with the product only to have an inconvenience on our hands. We have garbage that once we throw into that little plastic bag lined bin it disappears forever and our problems are solved.

But to where does that garbage go? It goes to a land that is far, far away from us.  It goes to a place that some people somewhere will trustingly take care of that garbage.  Bacteria will decompose the garbage causing a smell that most people will never have to endure. It goes to a landfill.

People don’t usually like to think about landfills. All we really know about them is that they are basically large piles of trash that will decompose at some unknown rate.  Here are a few statistics I found to give you an idea of how long certain things take to decompose:

·         Banana peels, 2-10 days

·         Cotton rags, 1-5 months

·         Paper, 2-5 months

·         Rope (natural fiber), 3-14 months

·         Orange peels, 6 months

·         Wool socks, 1-5 years

·         Cigarette filters, 3-12 years

·         Milk cartons, 5 years

·         Plastic bags, 10-20 years

·         Leather shoes, 25-40 years

·         Nylon fabric, 30-40 years

·         Styrofoam cup, 100 years

·         Plastic 6-pack holder rings, 450 years

·         Plastic Beverage Bottle – unknown, possibly 500+ years

·         Glass bottle – 1 million years

And the breakdown process isn’t very pretty.  Even landfills that are closely regulated tend to have leaks and cracks that allow garbage juice (the really smelly, nasty kind) to drip through the soil and get into underground waterways.

Here are some pictures of landfill pollution:

Hey! Don’t think I’m done trying to make you feel bad about throwing away your plastic wrappers! One more thing I want to mention to my readers is something that not many people (including people in my field of study) know about. The Pacific Trash Vortex (aka The Great Pacific Garbage Patch) is a landfill in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

 

Researchers have estimated it to be between 700,000 square kilometers (the size of Texas) to 15,000,000 square kilometers (almost twice the size of the US). This giant ocean landfill is wreaking insane levels of havoc on ocean ecosystems and killing billions of marine organisms. Here is more info about the vortex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

What is the solution to this problem? There is none! Not yet at least. Once a landfill becomes hazardous to the environment, it is almost impossible to reverse the damage. And pollution can only be easily controlled at local levels. When looking at larger scales of trash production, the best way to control pollution is to educate people about the impact they have and about what they can do to prevent such impacts.  

So what can you do to reduce your impact?  “Reduce, reuse, and recycle” is the new phrase of century. Take extra steps to reduce the amount of waste you produce.  Start using products that have been recycled. And if you don’t already recycle, start doing so. Recycling and composting can cut the amount of garbage you produce by at least half. And my final piece of advice is to tell people about what you know about reducing your impact.

So my challenge for the week is to take initiative! Get creative with it. Find a way to recycle and/or compost. If you are like me and have extreme difficulty finding ways to recycle (because apartment complexes can be difficult to work with sometimes), then learn more about the impacts our trash has on the environment and reach out to others.  It is very easy to ignore garbage because getting rid of it has become so easy for us. Take the initiative to NOT ignore your impact.