For the past 23 days we've been weighing our household trash (not including recyclables) before we take it out to the big green can. To our shock and disgrace, our little family of four has been averaging about 42 pounds of trash per week. For those of you without a calculator handy, that's 2,184 pounds a year--not including Christmas detritus, which probably adds another 40 pounds or so. That's more than a ton of trash per year. A ton. From one average family.
The rough total for just the families living on our street? About 61,000 pounds (30+ tons) per year.
Now imagine a neighborhood. A town. A city. A state. It makes me sick just to think about it.
Where is all this trash going?
According to www.zerowasteamerica.org, the U.S. has more than 3,000 active landfills, more than 10,000 old, out-of-use municipal landfills, and probably many thousand more private and commercial dumps. A disclaimer on the site warns that most of the information there has not been updated since 2002. Does anyone believe things have gotten better since then?
I'm beginning to feel a sense of urgency I did not have when we first began this.
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