Most of us just throw something away and we think nothing more of it, but that trash will
go on quite the journey after it’s left your hands.
We throw a lot of stuff out, too.
It’s hard to say how much each individual person dumps because we all have different
lifestyles, but if you look at figures from the United States Environmental Protection
Agency, the average American will produce about 5.91 pounds of trash each day.
We’ll mainly focus on the USA today, because hey, it’s said Americans produce a lot of
garbage.
In 2019 The Guardian wrote, “The U.S. represents 4% of the world’s population but produces
12% of municipal solid waste.”
In comparison, the countries of China and India make up more than 36% of the world’s
population and generate 27% of that waste, said the newspaper.
The question is, where does all the garbage go?
This is a very complicated story, because trash can be a global traveler.
We have some data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and although a couple of
years old, that data said in the USA 262 million tons of municipal waste is created each year.
That’s a lot of garbage.
Half of that is said to end up in a landfill somewhere.
Landfills are also a complicated issue and we’ll get around to that.
Of the total waste in the USA only one quarter of it is recycled.
Well, allegedly recycled, but we’ll get around to that, too.
In 2019, The Guardian said that throughout the entire world each year we produce 2.1
billion metric tons of municipal waste.
You can find different figures, but most are close to that amount.
By 2025, the mass of garbage we create will be much, much bigger, according to The World
Bank.
If you didn’t know, when we talk about municipal waste we are talking about the stuff collected
by the city, the garbage we all are responsible for.
By the way, if you’re British you might call this stuff “rubbish.”
Rubbish, garbage, trash, waste, tom-a-to, tom-ar-to, it’s all the same.
To give you some idea of how much garbage we all create in this world each year, it’s
enough to fill 822,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.
We recycle only about 16 percent of this globally, leaving a lot of garbage that just rests some
place or goes up in flames.
Now let’s follow some garbage on its journey so we know what it gets up to.
The Rockefeller Institute tells us that when we throw stuff out, such as food scraps, clothes,
boxes, bottles, cans, etc, certain things travel different paths.
There are three main paths, and those are to a recycling plant, to a landfill, and to
a place it can be incinerated and turned into energy.
But first it has to be sorted at a sorting facility.
You might not know this, but some countries accept waste from other countries and they
then recycle that waste.
China for instance has imported a lot of recyclable waste from the USA over the years, but we
are told China put its price up and restricted how much it buys and a lot of municipalities
in the U.S. didn’t much like this and so opted to turn to Waste-to-Energy Facilities
and Landfills.
This has a negative effect on the environment, though.
The Atlantic asked in 2019 that if the USA is creating more and more waste, what happens
now that China is off the table as a dumping ground?
This is a snippet from that article: “For decades, we were sending the bulk of
our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods
such as shoes and bags and new plastic products.
But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines,
office paper, junk mail—and most plastics.”
More cities are now turning to burning and landfills, so while in the past in the USA
a lot of the recyclable waste might have ended up in China, it’s now more likely to end
up in a landfill someplace or get incinerated.
It may also get into the wrong hands and end up where it shouldn’t, and that’s another
issue we will get to later.
The Atlantic tells us that landfills produce lots of methane and are bad for the environment,
and burning produces carbon emissions, which are also bad for the environment.
The conclusion to this article was that while for a long time Americans could just throw
away stuff and not think about it, maybe it’s now time to start thinking about consuming
less.
The National Waste & Recycling Association said for years low-paid workers in China would
sort through American trash, but those days are over.
It also said that in the USA it makes little sense to hire people to do the same because
it’s cheaper not to recycle and just buy new plastics and paper.
There are state-of-the-art recycling facilities in the U.S., but the problem is these trash-sorting
machines keep failing because so much non-recyclable waste is thrown out with the recyclable stuff.
Better machines are needed, because they get clogged and break a lot.
According to one U.S. manager of a plant, you have to ask the question, “At what point
do you feel like you’re spending more money than what it takes for people to feel good
about recycling?”
So, if you can’t send the trash abroad to be sorted it might get sorted in the U.S.,
but as we know, not much of this trash is recycled due to costs.
The trash is piling up, but it's hard to tell people to buy less because buying stuff makes
up a large part of the economy.
This creates quite the conundrum.
It’s a puzzle the whole world will have to figure out sooner or later.
We can look at statistics from a few years ago.
In 2015, if you threw something in the trash in the USA it would be picked up by a garbage
truck.
That truck then disposes of the stuff somewhere else.
The place where the garbage waits is called a transfer station.
From there it will be given a destination.
Back in 2015 it’s said in the U.S. 52.5 percent of the garbage would be sent to a
landfill.
25.8 percent would be sent to a recycling center.
12.8 percent to a waste-to-energy plant.
The rest would be composted.
That’s a lot of waste in landfills, and if we are to believe these recent articles
saying more and more will get dumped in these things, we might ask what happens to garbage
when it is there.
Landfills consist of layers that are lined with clay and then covered in a plastic skin.
Drains and pipes are installed to take the contaminated fluid created by the trash.
One layer is filled and then it is covered with another sheet of plastic and on top of
that soil and plants will be placed.
The garbage after time should decompose.
The stuff we recycle that shouldn’t end up in these landfills are mostly the materials
of paper, glass, plastic, wood and metals.
So, if it’s not recyclable and doesn’t end up in the landfill it should get burned.
Now that China and some other countries have cut down on what they take from other nations,
countries in Europe such as the UK, as well as in the USA, are going to have to create
more facilities for garbage on their own land.
We’ve talked a lot about the USA, but recent articles in the British press tell us the
UK was sending 2.7 million tons of plastic waste to China each year and some more to
other nations in Asia.
In 2018, The Guardian wrote that Britain still doesn’t have anywhere near enough facilities
to recycle.
For that reason, most of the trash gets exported.
The problem is though, while it’s sent abroad to be recycled investigations revealed it
was actually sometimes just getting dumped in landfills, and those landfills were spread
all across Asia and some countries in Europe that are not quite as wealthy as Britain.
The problem in the USA has happened in the UK, with countries no longer accepting waste
or charging a lot for it.
In 2019, an article described exactly what happens to British waste.
It followed the journey of an empty can of Coca-Cola.
So, the consumer throws that in the “bin” with the rest of the stuff.
The garbage men, there sometimes called “bin men” will take it to another place for sorting.
These places are called materials recovery facilities, and there the materials will be
separated into their constituent parts.
After that the parts will be sent to various brokers and traders, because waste is big
business.
In the UK about two thirds of all plastic waste will be sent to countries in Europe
and Asia.
About half of all paper and cardboard will go on the same journey.
The rest of the paper and cardboard will go to mills in the UK, while most of the glass
will be melted, washed, or smashed.
What’s left, food scraps, bits and pieces, will be sent to a landfill in the UK.
Like the USA, the UK produces more garbage than it can handle.
As China has started turning its nose up at the garbage and its cheaper to buy new plastic
in the UK than recycle it there, a problem has arisen.
The Guardian wrote in 2019 that a lot of British rubbish now ends up in other Asian countries
such as Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
The problem, wrote the newspaper, is that a lot of the stuff isn’t recycled in those
countries and instead ends up in landfills or even illegal dumping sites.
Malaysia is home to some of these sites and in 2018 a lot of British waste was found at
one of the sites, along with other nations’ waste.
British companies have also been found guilty of lying, saying waste contained one thing
when it actually contained a lot of other things.
In one case a shipment of “paper” from one of the UK’s largest waste companies
was actually made up of sanitary towels, diapers and clothes.
It seems there are a lot of bent players in the game of get rid of the garbage.
In 2019, a Thai media outlet said that now that China isn’t accepting the waste: “Thailand
and its Southeast Asian neighbors are becoming major dumping grounds for the world’s plastic
garbage and electronic waste.”
The problem is, while there are laws as to what can be dumped in countries such as Thailand
and Malaysia, there are legal loopholes and some people are just breaking the law.
The loophole in Thailand is actually quite simple.
That’s because it’s not illegal to import waste if it’s for recycling.
But then in many cases it just won’t be recycled and instead just gets dumped.
Activists have said some of the waste has even ended up in abandoned buildings, while
illegal waste is being found in other places all the time.
The wealthy nations wash their hands of the stuff because they can’t deal with it, and
unscrupulous businessmen in some less-wealthy nations are making a packet.
Sometimes the waste is discovered before it can be dumped, with Thai police saying they
discovered a huge waste pile in 2018 just outside Bangkok.
The stuff came from 35 countries that included the USA, Hong Kong, China, Germany, Japan,
Malaysia and Vietnam.
One U.S. activist said people feel better in the U.S. because they feel their garbage
is being recycled abroad, but he said that’s often a myth.
He told The Guardian in 2019, “It all sounded good.
‘It’s going to be recycled in China!’
I hate to break it to everyone, but these places are routinely dumping massive amounts
of plastic and burning it on open fires.”
It’s a case of out of sight, out of mind, but some people might be suffering from other
people’s garbage.
So, to conclude this story, when you throw something into the trash it might end up being
burned or recycled or placed in landfill in your country, but there is a good chance it’s
going to find its way to another nation, either for recycling or sometimes to be illegally
dumped.
It’s a problem, this waste thing, and that issue is ongoing.
We should likely be mindful of what we consume and dump, but the economy at large wants us
to consume our hearts away and remain sick with the desire to buy more and dump more.
We haven’t mentioned the ocean in this video, because that's a story unto itself.
But a lot of rubbish does end up in the ocean.
In fact, it’s said in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch there is 1.8 trillion pieces
of trash weighing a staggering 88,000 tons.
Ocean garbage comes from all over the world, but it’s reported that the worst polluters
of the water are China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
Most of it isn’t just thrown in there directly, but comes from other waterways, from sewers,
or blown from landfills or streets.
So a bottle you threw out in Baltimore could conceivably end up at an illegal dumping site
in Bangkok and then make its way into the ocean.
We should end with something positive, though, because all the time technology is coming
up with better machines to sort garbage.
Machines have been invented that use artificial intelligence to better sort the stuff, and
so we hope soon those machines will make recycling in wealthy nations cost effective and they
won’t have to use poorer nations as dumping grounds.
Automation in this case will take some jobs away, but we think machines here might save
the day.
Do you have a better idea for what to do with our garbage?
Tell us in the comments.
Now go watch “Insane Things Garbage Men Have Found In Trash Dump!”
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.