Trash Talk

I love random, useless facts!  If it's an off-the-wall piece of trivia, I'm all ears.  So with some of my recent posts talking about garbage and recycling and water bottles, I figured I'd surf the web for some interesting (mostly shocking) pieces of useless information.  Here are some of the fun facts that I came across.  Very interesting.....

Water Bottles

• Water bottles currently comprise about two percent of landfill waste
• Some environmentalists believe it can take a plastic bottle up to 1000 years to decompose
• Americans use about 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour - most of them are thrown away

Compost, people!

• Around 80% of the garbage produced annually in the US is organic and compostable
• Every year, the average American throws out about 1,200 lbs of organic garbage that could be composted

Garbage...and more garbage

• The average American contributes 4.5 lbs a day to landfills
• If all our newspapers were recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year
• 30% of trash in landfills is paper (another 18% is food scraps and another 16% is plastic)
• Landfills are running out at a rate of one per day - we are consuming more with less room to put the trash
• US population discards 16,000,000,000 diapers (that's billions!!) - in US alone that is 100,000 tons of plastic and 800,000 tons of tree pulp that will still be in the landfills 300 years from now
• The highest point in Hamilton County, Ohio (near Cincinnati) is "Mount Rumpke".  It is actually a mountain of trash at the Rumpke sanitary landfill - 1045 feet about sea level  [I enjoy that piece of information since that's where I'm from!]

And let's be serious, I'm not perfect when it comes to recycling or composting or my own consumption.  I still find these facts quite interesting (and eye-opening) at the same time.  Again...it's all about the baby steps...

All of this information kind of reminds me of the Pixar movie, WALL-E, where humans are forced to live in large space stations because we have created too much trash to make earth liveable....