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Household Waste: The Facts

Humans produce a lot of waste, which is something that has been highlighted in the two decades as environmental awareness has increased. Everyday activities involve the production of waste, but just how impactful is household waste and what are the hard facts about it? Read on to find out.

Generation

Humans generate over 60 tons of household waste per second, globally chucking out over 2 billion tons of household waste per year. That means in 2 hours, enough household waste is produced by humans to fill the world’s largest container ship to the brim. What’s more, with a growing population, waste production keeps increasing. Experts say that the amount of waste that humanity generates will snowball far above the rate that the world’s population grows. SMH, that is incredible TBH.

The Importance of the Supply Chain

This seems like a major amount of waste, so how is it possible? Your streets aren’t littered with trash and waste management services seem to be doing a good job, so how can this be?

The answer is that the waste that you generate isn’t the only waste that’s produced. In getting you your consumables, 70 times as much waste is created further up the supply chain. Whether that’s in packaging companies that have to discard plastic cut-offs or waste produced from the harvesting of raw materials like oil or minerals, there will be a lot of waste further up the supply chain.

Local Impact

One of the best things somebody can do for their mental health is to declutter their surroundings and enjoy a clean space. However, spring cleaning can have a local impact when there aren’t proper waste management resources at a homeowner’s fingertips, as people start to engage in fly-tipping. Even though it’s an illegal practice, it still causes problems for municipalities and communities. In many developing countries like India, fly-tipping causes huge problems as rivers of plastic run through towns. In the developed world, solutions like BrightHouse have evolved to support considerate de-clutterers, but dedicated solutions aren’t as common as municipalities might hope.

Burning Waste

Many people think that the only issue relating to waste is the space it occupies. This is far from the truth: one of the major problems relating to waste is when people get rid of it by burning it. This plays a major role in global warming — burning waste is responsible for the pollution of local environments as well as the pollution of the planet. There is also concern about the placement of incinerators in the U.S. as 80% of them are sited in communities where more than 25% of residents are low income or people of color.

Solutions

There are many innovative solutions to the problem of household waste being invested in. One such solution is the use of insects to dispose of organic waste. The insects eat the organic waste, turning it into protein to feed animals, as part of a circular ecosystem. Researchers around the globe are also trying to biologically engineer bacteria and other microbes to digest plastic waste, which is a promising area of scientific development.