Have you ever wondered where your garbage goes after tossing
it to the curb? Well, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology decided to find out.
These researches started out by attaching a transmitter chip
to thousands of pieces or ordinary garbage. They then tossed this so called
“smart trash” into the bin and then sat back and watched the torturous,
unsettling path that our garbage takes on a daily occurrence.
This clever experiment shined a light about something we may
have never thought about, our ignorance of how much we produce, what it
contains and what happens to it once it leaves our hands.
The average American tosses out about 4.4 pounds of trash
per day! About a third of that trash gets recycled and the rest goes to
landfills.
Here are some key numbers from the emerging science of
garbology!
At 7.1 pounds of trash a day, each of us is on track to
produce a staggering 102 tons of waste in an average lifetime.
Trash has become America’s leading export with mountains of
waste paper, soiled cardboard, crushed beer cans and junked electronics.
According to the U.S. Census data on municipal budgets,
American communities on average spend more money on waste management than on
fire protection, parks and recreations, libraries or schoolbooks.
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