Do you have a trash can in your room?
Is it full now? Every day, every person in the United States throws away about three and a half pounds of trash. In a year’s time, all that trash would fill a hole the size of a football field. Guess how deep that hole would be. How about 100 miles deep! It would fill enough garbage trucks to reach halfway to the Moon. That’s in just one year. The trash includes 60 million plastic bottles and almost 2 million aluminum soda cans. In just one day, each person chucks out almost two pounds of paper. Where does it all go? Landfills. Landfills in the United States are filling up faster and faster. The costs and problems of opening new landfills are huge. That’s why conservation is such big deal.