Winford Chang
The average American produces more than 1700 pounds of trash each year and averages around 4.4 each day. That’s almost an entire ton of trash each year! And each year with many Americans throwing away that much trash imagine the landfills.
The landwills and jam packed with trash to rot each year with almost 139 million tons of trash thrown down there each year with a large portion of that being uneaten food, plastic, and paperboards. In the US around 30 million tons of the 139 million are food. With 30 million tons of food there would be a lot less food issues going around the world.
Around 27 million of the 139 million tons of trash thrown in landfills each year are plastic, plastic is an extremely durable object that could take hundreds of years to decompose with it normally taking around 450 years to decompose a plastic bottle. While decomposed too, the plastic becomes small microplastics that get absorbed into soil which will eventually make its way to us.
A small portion of 20 million of the landfill garbage though is cardboard. Cardboard is very decomposable and will only take around 5 to eight months of constant erosion to decompose.
With objects like plastic though recycling is an extremely good option. Instead of throwing so much plastic in a landfill for 450 years, we can easily melt and reuse plastic. So next time you finish drinking your water and instead of throwing it in the recycling bin, you throw it in the trash can, You should think about it for a bit and maybe do what you think is the best option.
