According to the US EPA’s assessment of the waste management situation in the US, we are no worse off in terms of waste production than people were in the 1960’s. In 1960, 2.51 lbs/person/day of waste were generated in the Unites States. In 2008, every person in the United States produced 2.43 lbs of waste each day, after considering the recovery of material through recycling, composting and combustion.
As a nation, we should be both proud of and inspired by this statistic! But, it should also cause a bit of consideration. From these statistics, we know that we are both willing and able to participate in recycling and composting programs, but a closer look at the waste generation tallies shows that there is so much more that we could be doing in those areas.
In 2008, we generated a grand total of 250 million tons of trash. A whopping 25.9% of this material is organic waste in the form of yard trimmings (13.2% of the total waste amount) and food waste (12.7% of the total waste amount). This works out to 64.75 million tons of yard trimmings and food waste being produced each year. Currently, 22.1 million tons of this category of waste is diverted from landfills and put into composting operations. So, roughly only 1/3rd of all the food and yard wastes that are being generated by us are avoiding a useful and wasteful ending. When these types of organic wastes are piled into landfills, they are put in situations where they will rot and produced atmospherically harmful greenhouse gases (methane and carbon dioxide). Diverting 1/3rd of these organic materials is a great start. In fact, it reduces the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as removing 8 million passenger cars for 1 year.
Is 1/3rd good enough? I think we should make all efforts to increase this ratio and continue to divert more and more organic from landfills. Why not use these “waste” materials to generate energy through anaerobic digestion and then use them as compost to fertilize the land? In the United States, we all pride ourselves on our entrepreneurial spirit, so why not channel that to better reduce our waste through a means we already know how to do and divert all those 64 million tons of food and yard wastes? Through the use of dry fermentation anaerobic digestion systems and biogas burning combined heat and power units, this amount of organic materials could be used to heat 1,293,171 homes and power 1,325,075 homes for a year. What a staggering use of renewable energy.
You can find these data from the US EPA brochure here.
