For context I live in the UK but I guess it’s pretty much the same worldwide.
I live in a country with something like 65 million people and around 20 million households.
We get recycling and non recycling collected separately every other week.
I imagine over a two week period most people easily fill their waste bin. I normally can squeeze in around 5 or 6 bin bags.
So that must mean around 140 million bin bags are dumped each fortnight or more. That is 3.5 billion bags a year!!
Where the hell does it all go?
In: Other
My food and yard waste is composted where I can actually then buy it back at local lawn and garden stores. My trash is put on a train and buried in the desert in the state next to mine.
Incineration or landfill, which is why there is a big push for recycling as dealing with the trash is expensive, though it may be cheaper and more environmentally friendly to burn paper to generate electricity than to recycle it. https://youtu.be/WOpkew6V-Lk
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Mostly landfills or incineration. The landfill is a huge piece of property with massive heaps of rubbish that get trucked and dozed around and eventually buried. Deep burial is a pretty good way to contain waste, although toxic chemicals can leach into the ground water (and this is a concern for all landfills, old and new). I used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and there are many parks (some of them right on the water) that used to be landfills. They got too full, so the cities covered them with concrete rubble and dirt, sowed grass and put in some sculptures, now they are very nice public parks.
Historically, it was not uncommon for people to create their own landfills on their properties. Archaeologically, these are called “middens” – underground trash heaps from centuries ago and further.
My current city has a very robust system to sort waste: what you call “rubbish”, we usually call trash or garbage, and goes to the ‘dump’, where it goes into a landfill. It is about 10K from town, which is good because it is smelly. Piles that get buried still emit gasses like methane, and these gasses get trapped for profitable collection. I don’t think they do any solid incineration, but I could be wrong about that. They also pick out large items that shouldn’t go into a landfill, should they find their way there (and the work crew can spot them). People can choose the company that picks up their waste, or they can refuse this service and take their waste to the dump themselves (for a fee).
Items that can be recycled go to a recycling center and do actually get sorted and turned over to different recyclers. I’m told that our facility has ensured that these materials do actually get recycled, and not put in a barge to appear over the ocean. Some people in town choose *not* to pay for the recycling service, so they lump this stuff into their trash (blast them), or take it to some street side recycling bin.
There is another facility often called a CHaRM (Center for Hard to Recycle Materials) that takes just about anything that really shouldn’t go into a landfill but isn’t easy to recycle and shouldn’t get lost in a recycling stream – batteries, paint, broken refrigerators, scrap metal, old mattresses, etc). Theoretically they charge a fee, but I rarely get charged when I take small things to them.
We used to have an electronics recycling facility for computer components, motherboards, old cell phones, but they closed during Covid and haven’t returned.
The city also picks up bagged leaf and grass clippings, and these go to another section of the landfill where they get properly composted in massive piles. Currently they are trialing a new process to pick up food-scrap waste from households as well, and they will put that towards their composting too. This service is amazing – you can put a lot of things in there that can’t be recycled like unwanted cooked food, used tissues, greasy pizza boxes, lined paper coffee cups. I could never compost at that scale at home. They sell or give the compost back to residents who ask for it. I’ve been participating in this new service, so between recycling and diverting to food scrap waste, my trash volume has been reduced to about 1-2L per week. Most of my trash now is plastic wrappers.
The landfill also has constructed a composting facility for bio-solids. I don’t know much about this but I think they take processed sludge (it’s not ‘poo’, it’s the by-product of poo degradation) from the sewage system and compost it separately from the green waste; this gets sold to industries that can use it.
It’s definitely not the same around the world, and even within the UK each different council does it differently
Some places you have to separate out different things, others all the recycling goes together, some places you can only recycle certain stuff and more goes to landfill because they don’t have the facilities to recycle everything
Most of the general waste will go to incinerators or landfill, depending on where you live. The recycling will get sorted in various different ways, depending on how they get you to separate things.
They used to sell a lot of plastic and ship it overseas, but i don’t think the market is there for it any more, so i think there is a challenge of what to do with all the plastic we send for recycling, because there’s not that much demand for it
Where i used to live in Sheffield you could pay extra for garden waste as well, but not all councils do that kind of thing
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