Human Footprint: Where Does All the Stuff Go?
by Dan Kulpinski
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Our human footprint doesn’t end after we buy and consume things; the final impact occurs
when we discard items – and we Americans discard four-fifths of a ton of trash per person,
per year.
Here are the numbers: Americans generated 251 million tons of trash in 2006, the most
recent year for which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has data. Our per capita
trash disposal rate was 4.6 pounds per person, per day. Sixty-five percent came from
residences, while 35 percent came from schools and commercial locations such as hospitals
and businesses.
Where does it all end up? Fifty-five percent gets buried in landfills, 33 percent gets
recycled, and 12.5 percent goes to incinerators.
Collecting and transporting trash and recyclables is a mammoth task. According to the
National Solid Waste Management Association, the solid waste industry employs 368,000
people. They use 148,000 vehicles to move garbage to 1,754 landfills and 87 incinerators.
They also pick up recyclables at curbside in 8,660 communities and take them to 545
materials recovery facilities for sorting. Solid waste is big business to the tune of about $47
billion in annual revenue.
After You Throw It Away
If your trash goes to a landfill it will end up sealed in the ground. It won’t decompose much,
if at all, because air and water can’t get in. “Most landfills are more like mummifiers than
composters,” wrote Elizabeth Royte in ‘Garbage Land.’
Landfills have some adverse environmental impacts. Despite careful engineering, they can
leak liquids into the groundwater. Landfills also release one-fourth of all methane; landfill
and wastewater treatment gases made up 2.3 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in
2005. At some landfills, gas-to-energy projects capture the gas to make electricity or to
replace other fuels.
If your trash goes to an incinerator, it gets burned and turned into ash, which is used to make
roads or parking lots, or is dumped in landfills. The burning also produces gases such as
nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide (both cause smog and the latter causes acid rain), as well
as trace amounts of toxics such as mercury compounds and dioxins.
Incinerators also create electricity. The 87 active incinerators (called waste-to-energy
plants) generate 2,700 megawatts of power a year, which is enough electricity to power 2.3
million homes, but only amounts to 0.3 percent of U.S. power generation.
Pollution created by transporting waste to disposal areas also harms the environment.
Trucks and trains used to move waste all create diesel exhaust, which contains nearly 40
toxic substances. Several organizations, including the EPA, have classified diesel exhaust as
a probable or potential human carcinogen.
In Manhattan, for example, diesel trucks carry garbage 7.8 million miles every year,
according to “Trash and the City,” a report by Environmental Defense. That’s the equivalent
of circling the Earth 312 times.
New York City also ships its waste via truck and train as far away as Ohio and Virginia.
Mel Peffers, an air quality project manager for Environmental Defense, explained: “Along
that route all that pollution coming off of the diesel exhaust is very significant and it is the
largest driver for our air cancer, our additional air cancer risk, and specifically the soot
associated with diesel … is very bad.”
The Benefits of Recycling
Recycling avoids many of these impacts. When you recycle something, the item gets sorted
and used to make similar items – aluminum cans, for example, contain about 41 percent
recycled aluminum. It takes 95 percent less energy to make a can from recycled aluminum
than from virgin bauxite ore.
By using recycled materials, the manufacturer creates fewer greenhouse gases. Recycling
also reduces climate change emissions from incinerators and landfills. “Recycling is a winwin in terms of global warming pollution,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with
the Natural Resources Defense Council and director of its national solid waste project.
According to the EPA, recycling provides an annual benefit of 49.7 million metric tons of
carbon equivalent emissions reduced, comparable to removing 39.4 million passenger
cars from the road each year.
Interestingly, items diverted for recycling don’t always remain in the United States. The
number one U.S. export by volume is scrap paper, which travels by container ships to Asia
and Mexico. Scrap metal was also among our most valuable exports last year.
The scrap paper does help these nations conserve more of their forests, but as a result we
lose some of ours. America’s southeastern forest – what Hershkowitz calls “the most
biologically diverse forest in the world” – is still being used to make paper. “That’s the
downside of our paper exports, that we are not replacing the destruction of southeast
forests with recycled fiber,” he said.
How to Change the Waste Equation
Is our waste disposal system desirable or sustainable? In its solid waste report for 2006,
the EPA says, “At the national level, landfill capacity appears to be sufficient.” It’s possible
to continue burying most of our trash – but should we?
One way to keep things out of landfills is to increase our recycling rate. The EPA has a
national target of a 35 percent recycling rate for 2008; Peffers recommends a minimum
target of 75 percent. Kate Krebs, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition
says we can double our current rate.
Krebs’ organization has a plan to boost recycling, by encouraging municipalities to adopt
best practices being used in high-performing recycling programs like those in San
Francisco (69 percent recycling rate) and Madison, Wisconsin (57 percent recycling rate).
But EPA and environmentalists agree that the best solution to the waste problem is to
phase out waste. It all starts with product design.
“Waste is just really a design flaw and we have to be pushing on manufacturers and
product designers to design things which are easily recyclable,” said Krebs.
Hershkowitz added, “Landfills by definition are wasteful … Waste is an indication of
inefficiency; the more efficient you are, the less waste you produce. The less efficient you
are, the more waste you produce. So we need to start becoming more efficient in our
production processes.”
Right now, for every pound of garbage people generate, about seven pounds of waste are
produced upstream (in the manufacturing process, before the product gets to the
consumer). “Ninety-five percent … of a product’s environmental impact happens before the
package is even opened,” said Hershkowitz.
Also, the garbage we throw away is just the tip of the trash iceberg in the United States.
Most of the iceberg consists of industrial waste from factories, agriculture, construction,
mining operations, oil and gas operations and other sources. This piles up to a mindboggling 14 billion tons of waste per year.
Climate Change Could Spur Action
The push to regulate carbon emissions in order to fight climate change could be the key to
getting manufacturers to design waste out of their products.
“By now looking to control carbon at production plants, we will also make production
facilities more efficient as concerns reducing their waste … When you make aluminum
from aluminum cans instead of virgin bauxite, you reduce by more than half the amount of
global warming emissions … So the regulation of carbon is going to fundamentally alter
the economics of recycling,” said Hershkowitz.
Other factors may have to come into play to phase out waste: Shifting tax breaks and
government subsidies from landfills and incinerators to recycling plants; passing extended
product responsibility laws, such as those in Europe, mandating that companies that
produce products also be responsible for their disposal.
In the meantime, everyone can take steps to make a difference. Make sure to check out
the sidebar tips throughout this article to learn how to create less trash and reduce your
carbon footprint.
Human Footprint Questions:
1. Where does the items we discard end up?
2. What happens to the trash that end up in a landfill?
3. What happens to the trash that gets sent to the incinerator? What are some of the positives and negatives
here?
4. What are some of the benefits of recycling that the article talks about?
5. How can we improve our waste disposal system?