For thousands of years the largest man-made structure on earth was the
Great Wall of China. Today the largest is a place called Fresh Kills landfill,
a mountain of trash covering 3,000 acres on Staten Island. That's part of New York
City, but New York's not the only place with a
garbage problem, a landfill problem. It's everywhere including Georgia.
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The United States creates more waste than any other country on earth.
The average American generates four pounds of garbage every day. Collectively
throughout America, that equals 180 million tons of solid waste per year.
Ever wonder where all our garbage goes?
While most of it, 73%, is taken to landfills like this one. Problem solved?
Not quite because landfills are extremely expensive costing as much as a
quarter of a million dollars per acre to build and operate. Landfill space is also running out.
For years we thought that landfills were going to be here forever.
I can remember when I was little being told that landfills, when we would take
our garbage, I remember asking my dad what would we do if it fills up? Oh that
would never happen he would say, that could never happen. Well it has.
A lot of landfill space is taken up with materials like paper that can be
recycled. So in 1990 Georgia's legislature asked our cities and towns
to start recycling programs in order to conserve our landfills.
The state's goal
was a 25% reduction many towns ignored that goal but not douglasville.
And while it was a goal, we feel like if you set a goal you need to try to reach that goal
and so we took it very seriously and came up with a plan that has enabled us
to reduce the our volume of solid waste from residential collections by more
than 40 percent.
This blue bag holds a week's worth of garbage for a single
family. Before douglasville had a recycling program, residents generated a
bag like this every day. Now even yard waste is recycled into
compost that can be used for gardening.
*Country Music*
But not everybody likes recycling. After all it means changing the way things
have always been done.
Though we still have some people that would yearn for
the old days but I think everybody, almost everybody, recognizes you cannot
dispose of your garbage in the future the way you have in the past. Whether
it's in Douglasville or any other place in Georgia or the United States.
This is different from our garbage can, isn't it? What we put in our garbage can we said
went someplace called a?
Dump.
Dump or a landfill, didn't we? What goes in our bin
doesn't go to the landfill. We're actually helping save that landfill space.
Many Americans think recycling is a newfangled idea of the 1990s but once
upon a time it was a national necessity. At the height of World War two, there was
a shortage of rubber the government. Begged people to turn in their old
rubber tires, gloves, garden hoses, to be made into tires for army jeeps and tanks
and they showed films like this across the country to encourage people to
recycle rubber.
Well Charlie, this is one of the last rubber tracks we'll get.
That's right.
If we don't get rubber, we'll have to stop making good tanks.
The rubber drive was so successful, it was followed by recycling
drives for steel, tin, even pantyhose, but after World War two recycling was
forgotten as factories manufactured goods at an ever-increasing rate.
America became a disposable nation. We throw away things almost as fast as we
buy them but wait think of it this way. When you throw away any paper, you are
throwing away a tree.
Recycled paper, you are saving trees and forests you know.
Why go out and cut down perfectly good timber land when you could recycle the
paper that's already here?
Recycling plastic saves oil, recycling aluminum can
saves a metal called bauxite.
Recycling is also good for the economy.
Things that are taken to the landfill and buried that's it.
They're gone. Papers, plastics, glass, that's recycled and it's reused and so
that gets back into the the economic stream so that what you receive in your
newspaper tomorrow or what you buy at the grocery store may actually be from
recycled materials and that does have a positive impact on the economy.
More and more Americans are recycling. That is influencing companies that make popular
products to do the same.
As part of an environmental approach to manufacturing,
the outdoor company Patagonia and started making clothing from
recycled materials. The scintilla fleece is made out of recycled soda pop bottles.
Basically for an adult scintilla snap tee it takes 25 bottles of soda pop
bottles to make an adults so with the kids is probably about half that amount.
And the next time you buy a pair of Nike shoes, be sure to give them your old
sneakers. They'll grind them up and make gym floors like this one donated to the
Boys and Girls Club.
Once people learn about recycling, they realize it's not
only a good idea, it's a necessary one.
So it's a family thing that we do together
and we know that we're helping the environment
and naturally as a mother we want what's best for our kids and the future is one
of our priorities.
It's made us realize there's other outlets for garbage other
than just always throwing it in the thing that the city takes away so it's
helped us realize, my son and myself, but what we're doing with our garbage on a
daily basis.
The United States ,state of Georgia are all growing, populations
increasing, land is very valuable. We just need to conserve and make our
landfills last as long as we possibly can and the only way to do that is
through reducing the volume of waste that we take to the landfills.
And so for every ton of solid waste that you can not take to the landfill because you do
recycling with it, that saves you that much money and we've realized a
substantial savings of money to the citizens of Douglasville because of our program.
Americans have seemed to warm up and embrace the whole concept of
recycling and the ecology in the environment, seems to b,e at least in the
younger ages. This generation, that's growing up now seems to be embracing the
whole concept and I think you're going to see a role reversal and that you will
not see government mandating its people to recycle but you'll see the people
mandating government to set recycling boundaries.
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Most plastic bags can take 10 to 20 years to decompose in landfills but some
types of plastic never decompose.