by Mariana Garcia, Herman Middle School
What should be done with all of our garbage? What can we do to reduce the amount of garbage we create?
Introduction
Imagine that you, your neighbors and everyone in the United States put all of your trash in one big pile for a year. That would be a big pile of garbage! The federal government estimates that each person throws away about 4.5 pounds of trash per day.
For many years, most of our trash went to landfills. But many of the landfills are filling up. This is causing the cost of using landfills to soar and forcing many communities to raise fees or taxes to pay for the additional costs. Landfills are no longer an easy answer for getting rid of all the trash we generate.
In some communities, the waste goes to an incinerator that burns it and recovers energy. Incinerators reduce the volume of waste, but landfills are still needed to bury the ash that results from the burning. Both incinerators and landfills are expensive and can take a long time to locate and build.
Because of these problems, many communities now are looking for other solutions. There is no simple remedy for solving our trash problems, but one that many communities have considered is recycling which reduces the amount of waste that goes to landfills and incinerators. Recycling can also help conserve our scarce natural resources because it reduces the need for raw materials.
According the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about one-third of our trash was recycled in 2006. A little more than half was transported to a landfill. The rest was incinerated.