eli5 how the trash system works?

Question

The amount of trash we (Americans) produce is insane. I don’t get how it actually all gets disposed of. I live in a less populated area but when I see all the trash set out each week in my neighborhood, I feel like it would fill up an entire trash truck. There are tons of neighborhoods around ours that are even bigger. Where tf does all the trash go. My mind explodes when I think of massive cities like NY. I just feel like more trash gets produced than can be disposed of. This is one of the things that makes me believe we live in a simulation 😂

In: 25

Answer 1

Depending on your area, your waste collection company may break it down to three categories.

1. Recyclables
2. Organics
3. Everything else

1.) Recyclables is plastics and cans. You know those triangle with numbers on plastic bottles? That’s useless, t’s something made up by the plastic companies. When you recycle plastics all into one bin, there’s not much companies that can recycle it cause there’s different types of plastic and they’re recycled differently; so we often ship it to other countries.

2.) Organics is something like your lawn clippings..Basically all the waste from your grass/trees. Some companies take these and make them into mulch or compost.

3.) Everything else goes into landfills. Imagine a big land and they dig a big hole, so everyday the trash truck takes the trash there and at the end of the day they compact it and put this industrial tarp to close it off. Then it’s the same thing the next day until the hole becomes a hill. Once it’s a hill, they monitor the area for 30~years to make sure the trash doesn’t leak to the groundwater or something. After that, the hill is changed to a park or something.

Basically, we just bury our problems away. That’s why it’s bad if you throw batteries or something toxic. Even though batteries may be dead, it may still catch on fire, so it’ll be buried and may catch on fire (and that’s bad). So what you can do is to educate yourself, reduce your waste output, reuse what you can (instead of throwing it out), then recycle. If you can’t do any of those 3, then it goes to the ground and stays there forever. Eventually we’ll run out of space, and that’s not good.