Is Burning Garbage the Solution to Our Overflowing Landfills?
A Green Washed Climate Destroyer
Our ability to produce garbage is unrivaled. Depending on where you look for your data you will get different figures, but the bottom line will be the same.
According to one source, the United States generates 220 million tons of garbage each year. This is roughly equivalent to burying 82,000 football fields 6 feet deep in garbage. The situation is even more grim when you take a global perspective. As a universal community, we produce 2.1 billion tons of garbage each year, which is roughly equivalent to 822,000 Olympic size swimming pools. We are quite literally swimming in trash and there is no expectation that it will get better without a massive behavior change.
Climate Analysts have been pointing out our high amount of garbage production for years and trying to change global population behavior. Although with some success, behavior change has not occurred on the scale needed to avoid disaster. Even so, we’ve seen incredible success with recycling programs globally. For instance, in 2018, 292.4 million tons of trash was generated in the United States and of this, 69 million was recycled and 25 million composted — equivalent to 32.1 percent. This might not seem like much considering that roughly 50 percent finds its ways into…
