Free
Trash is a big problem.
Every day, every person in this country throws away about three and a half pounds of trash. In a year’s time, all that trash would fill a hole as long and as wide as a football field. What’s scary is how deep that hole would be—100 miles deep! That’s so much trash, it would fill enough garbage trucks to reach halfway to the Moon. And that’s in just one year. So what’s in all that trash? There are 60 million plastic bottles and almost 2 million aluminum soda cans. Each day, each person tosses out almost two pounds of paper. And it all goes to landfills, which are filling up faster and faster. The costs and problems of opening new landfills are huge. That’s why conservation is such big deal.
Welcome to the Landfill
Most garbage goes to landfills. A landfill is an area just for trash. To keep animals away, new trash is covered with a layer of compacted soil every day. ▼
Would you like to be there when a landfill explodes? Yes, it can happen, and here’s how. As bacteria break down the trash, they make a gas called methane. You can’t see or smell methane, so it’s hard to know if it’s even there. If a lot of it builds up under the trash, it can explode. So landfills have pipes to collect the gas and carry it away. Some landfills even store and sell the methane as natural gas, which can be used to heat homes and businesses.
Keeping the trash dry and covered makes it decompose very, very slowly. A Styrofoam cup you put into a landfill today will still be there 500 years from now.
Ever throw a battery or paint into the trash? It’s not a good idea. Batteries, nail polish remover, spray cans, and other toxic trash give off dangerous chemicals. Landfills are mostly dry, but some water gets into the trash anyway. Then it works its way down through the layers of trash and dirt, bringing those chemicals with it. Pipes carry away most of the water in a landfill. But nothing’s perfect, and harmful chemicals can get into the soil under and around a landfill.
Reduce the amount of garbage you make.
Reuse things instead of throwing them out.
Recycle paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum.
• Fix something that’s broken instead of throwing it away.
• When you buy something, carry it home without a bag or take your own bag to the store.
• Avoid using throwaway forks and cups.
• Refill empty bottles of water instead of buying new ones.
• Use both sides of every sheet of paper. Save scrap paper for recycling.
• Buy and use things that are made to last.
• Buy goods that require less wrapping and packaging.
• Reuse empty jars as holders for things like pencils and pens.
• Instead of throwing out food waste and grass clippings, use them to make compost, which turns into new soil.
• Separate trash so you can recycle paper, glass, aluminum cans, and plastic.
• Take old batteries, cell phones, and other electronic equipment to a recycling center.
▲ Chad Pregracke was still in his teens when he started cleaning up the banks of the Mississippi River. He began by cleaning up 100 miles of the shore. He picked up and recycled more than 45,000 pounds of trash. The next year, 1998, he founded Living Lands and Waters (LL&W). It protects, preserves, and restores our major rivers and watersheds. Now it has 14 members and more than 70,000 volunteers. So far, they’ve cleaned up 8 million pounds of garbage along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Thanks to their hard work, more and more people see how necessary it is to preserve our rivers and the lands around them.
“Most people think we just pick up garbage. They forget what the garbage does to the wildlife in the rivers. A single car tire contains seven gallons of petroleum, and a fridge’s compressor is loaded with PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyl—a dangerous chemical waste]. We collect thousands of these a year.”
—Chad Pregracke
A Word About Recycling
• There are lots of reasons we should all recycle as much as we can. Recycling cuts down on how much trash goes into landfills. It also helps protect the environment, and it conserves energy and other resources.
• E-waste is old electronic stuff, like computers and cell phones. It contains lead and mercury, toxic chemicals that should never go into a landfill. So send your e-waste back to its manufacturer, or take it to special centers where they recycle e-waste.
• If you recycle one aluminum can, you’ve saved enough energy to power three hours of TV watching!
• If we recycled all our paper, we’d cut our trash by 40 percent. That would cause less pollution and would save water, energy, and trees. Trees take a long time to grow, so we shouldn’t just use them up and toss them.
