Most Popular Environment Article Challenge: The Garbage Mess If we imagine ourselves aboard a spaceship, we realize immediately that one of the first problems we’d encounter would be how to dispose of trash.
Plastics constitute a small but rapidly growing percentage of trash. North Americans throw away about sixty million plastic bottles every day, as well as thousands of tons of plastic in other forms – garbage bags, food wrappers, and so on.
The trash we bury in landfills represents huge amounts of wasted energy and wasted resources. We annually bury enough aluminum to rebuild the entire American commercial air fleet many times over and enough steel to reconstruct Manhattan. Recycle Newspapers Paper constitutes the largest portion of our trash, and newspapers alone take up 15% of the space in a typical landfill. One problem with newspapers is that they don’t decompose much in landfills that have liners intended to prevent toxic materials from leaching into the soil.
Americans annually throw away almost as many glass bottles and jars as they do aluminum cans – roughly thirty billion a year. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, that’s enough glass to fill the 1350-foot (412-m) twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center every two weeks.
Depending on the season and the part of the country where you live, anywhere from 15% to 35% of the garbage in your local landfill probably consists of food and yard wastes. |
copyright @Illnesscuring.com
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
17,858 Expert Authors Sharing Their Best Health Articles
| Article Categories |