While you likely know what day you need to put your garbage and recycling cans out on the street to be taken away, that’s likely the extent of your knowledge about your local waste management programs.
However, if you took the time to understand a bit more about how waste and recycling are managed and what type of impact you have on these aspects of your life, you might be a little more willing to change some of your habits in order to have a more positive impact on the world around you.
To help you get to this point, here are three things you might now know about waste management and recycling.
How Waste Management Is Measured
Because of the state that our world is in with regards to the creation of waste, it’s very important that certain agencies keep track of how much waste is being created this year. Not only can this information help us know how quickly things like landfills are filling up, but it can also help legislators see how effective their efforts at reducing waste are.
When tracking waste, measurements are made by the ton. For example, after all the waste was weighed in the United States for 2018, it totaled 292.4 million tons. Broken down a little bit more, this equals about 5 pounds of waste created by each person in the U.S. each day. Now, while you might not think that you’re creating this amount of waste each day, just knowing that this is how it all comes out in the wash can be enough to encourage you to try to create less waste when possible.
Recycling Different Items Conserves In Different Ways
When you choose to recycle, you’re cutting back on the waste that you’re creating throughout your life. However, not everything that you recycle has the same impact on the world.
Generally, recycling aluminum saves far more energy than recycling other items when comparing the same weight. And while this doesn’t mean that you should choose to recycle something solely based on how much can be conserved from that action, it can help you see where the most progress can be made.
Choosing To Recycle All Your Paper Would Make A Huge Difference
Although many places have started to make a more concerted effort to use less paper, it’s still been found that the average American citizen uses about 650 pounds of paper each year. But if you chose to recycle every paper that you got your hands on, not only would you be conserving energy, but you’d also be helping to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
If you’ve never really thought much about waste management or recycling in your daily life, consider how this information presented above might help you adjust some of your daily habits.