Does America have a Throw Away Society? Essay

we’re wasteful. In order to find solutions for our trash problem, we must first admit that we are

Take a moment to imagine the realization that a young boy came to when two of his favorite movies had a large plotline that was somewhat based on the problems of trash. Wall-E, the famous Pixar movie, was based on a small robot that was left behind on Earth’s surface alone. His job was to clean the garbage that the human population left behind when they went into space to escape their problems. Toy Story 3, another Pixar movie, contained a scene with garbage that was vital to the plot, in which the characters are rescued from a trash furnace that was consuming literally tons of trash a minute. These two movies tried to make the American population aware of the ever growing trash situation, however, Americans quickly forgot about the Earth shattering situation that they are causing. The solution to the world’s trash problem is easy; people need to be educated on the problems of trash and given an easy way to fix it. People should be required to visit a landfill, educated on the severity of the trash problem, and should be rewarded for changing their habits to improve the problem.

In order for environmental change to happen society needs to see the significance of trash. To make sense of that recall a time were you forgot to take the trash out and days later were reminded by the rotten stench? Now multiply the stench of that 1 bag 2 million times. To help you further understand let’s put this in mathematical terms. Let’s say on average 1 garbage bag weighs 20Lbs. that equates to 1bag=20lbs x 2,000,000 = 40 million putrid bags. This equation has opened my eyes. Rogers’s argument that Landfills should be in public places is a good one. Society is sheltered from Landfills: so they are out of sight therefore out of mind. If we can’t see the pollution we can’t change our carbon foot print.

Recycling is the process of making new products from a product that has originally served its purpose. The process of recycling starts when used products are disposed in an appropriate, environmentally friendly way. Items made from materials such as paper, tin cans, aluminum cans, plastic water bottles, and glass, which people use in everyday life, can be separated from regular trash and put in an appropriate recycling bin. The United States now realizes the importance of recycling. However, many ignorant people still think separating recyclables requires too much work. Requiring mandatory recycling would prod these individuals into action. Lack of recycling leads to dramatic consequences such as polluting the environment and raising the number of landfills. Delay is critical; time plays a significant role in waste management. The sooner American communities recycle properly the better it will be for the environment and our surroundings. People need to become conscious and take responsibility as a society to protect the earth, keep it clean and beautiful, and preserve the natural resources. The United States can achieve this goal by implementing mandatory recycling.

“Waste” is a short essay in which Wendell Berry critically analyzes the growing epidemic of trash that is polluting the nation’s land, waterways, and the air. Berry explains to the readers how the remnants of floods and litter that leave farmlands scattered with trash, makes more work for the farmers who have to rid their land of the trash before they can use it. Along with the floods, roads and highways also lead to a barrage of garbage from people who are too lazy or ignorant to take proper care of their garbage, which Berry claims leads to “. . . a constant precipitation of cans, bottles, the plastic-ware containers of fast food joints, soiled plastic diapers, and sometimes whole bags of garbage,” (Waste 1) along the edges of their fields. The garbage of the country continues to be a burden for everyone, whether it impacts them directly or not. Although it would be impossible to eliminate garbage completely from the country, the waste could be greatly reduced. Most of today’s trash is a consequence of the laziness of American society.

Recycling doesn’t affect people that much, but it does affect wildlife and animals. Like the six pack rings, soda comes in, fish get caught in it and they die. Another thing is plastic bags get thrown into the ocean and turtles mistake it for jellyfish, eat it and die. Would you believe me if I told you that glass, aluminum, paper and plastic are not A report from the Federal Highway Administration shows that 80 percent of the asphalt that is removed each year during widening and resurfacing is reused. Recycling has been around for thousands of years, but we still need to recycle even though people thought of this a long time ago. A consequence is the New York City Landfill. The New york city landfill contains 2.9 billion cubic feet of trash. The new york city landfill can be seen from space. The new york landfill is one of the only things that can be seen from space. Another consequence is that farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota are just now starting to recycle. Minnesota and Wisconsin farms produce 60 million to 80 million pounds of plastic every year, but until now they had no way to get rid of it besides throwing

A teacher once told me, “One mans trash is another mans treasure, what he doesn’t appreciate the next man will.” Until recently analyzing this statement I always pondered about it as a metaphor using the thoughts, and ideas of people, but after reading Garbology I have come up with a literal process of reusing trash. On average Americans wastes 220 million tons of waste generated each year in the United States which ends up in one of the over 3,500 landfills. According to Edward Humes, the author of Garbology, “Garbage has become one the most accurate measures of prosperity in the twenty-first-century America and the world,” which proves that trash is a means to improving the success rate of Americans. This reminds me of the words of Confucius who stated, “When a goal cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goal, adjust the action step” because with the knowledge from garbology we can

The society we live in is disposable we feel more than comfortable throwing away or removing things we use from cans, to shoes, and even plastic bottles because we feel as though it’s easier to throw them out then to fix them then reuse them. This process of renewal then reusing has been given a name; its name is “recycling”. The base word of recycle is cycle which according to Webster’s dictionary means to “a set of events or actions that happen again and again in the same order: a repeating series of events or actions.” While reading Garbology I learned the real reason why so much trash exists on our planet which is affecting our living conditions. Our planet is so “trashed” as a result undereducated people not pondering over where their trash ends up, allowing them to

For my sustainability project, my goal was to gather information on how to reduce waste in the environment in order to prevent the United States from being a wasteful society in the future. First, I began to recycle everything I used, such as plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic cups, plastic forks, plastic spoons, aluminum cans, candy wrappers, and even all types of papers. As a result, I noticed the amount of trash I had (that was not recyclable, such as unfinished foods and food scraps) was a lot lighter and I did not have to keep taking the trash bag to the dumpster once a week. To conclude, I recycled for a total of 3 months, starting in the month of September in the year of 2016 to the month of November in the same year. I did this experiment to test my goal on how to reduce waste. I chose to do my sustainability project on ways to reduce the amount of waste in the world today because I learned from reading Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash by Edward Humes, that the United States is filled with trash and many times people do not realize the consequences of trash and how it’s polluting the environment. As a result, I decided to do my project on reducing the amount of waste in the world today. I am curious if people actually start recycling and reusing their waste that is unintentionally being thrown in the trash, does the United States have a chance of reducing all this waste?

“We throw out about 254 million tons of solid waste per year in America alone” for comparison that is about 1.27 million average sized blue whales. That is a ton of trash! But, as Americans we do not see all this trash. We barely even touch it. It is all pretty much taken care of for us. So the trash is sort of out of sight out of mind. Let me put this into some

A third fact environmental fact that society should be made aware of is the negative impact of plastics left in landfills. The plastic is typically incinerated in an effort to save space, and this releases toxic greenhouse gases. The plastic that ends up in landfills, which is a considerable amount if we look at how much is not recyclable and also how much is simply not recycled by consumers, usually contains chemicals, such as lead and PVC, which can leak into the soil and be released into the air.

People tossing out trash means that they don’t care what happens to it as long as it’s out of their car or house. People should think of the impact they can cause the environment if they recycle properly, reusing water bottles, and when they go grocery shopping bring a reusable bags that won’t be thrown out into streams and lakes that will cause pollution to the environment. If someone throws garbage where it shouldn’t belong then throw it out for them to keep the environment clean.

People Need to Recycle In the United Sates, where the population is inflated every year. The amount of space for landfills decreases every day. The need for recycling should not be asked, it should just be done out of habit. Everyone in America needs to recycle, to help the lamdfill problem, help the environment, and help produce new products from recycled goods. In America there is about two-hundred and eight tons of residential and commercial trash generated a year, 4.3 pounds per person a day (Prichard 1A). This is an overwhelming amount of trashed produced yearly. When people recycle this number can be drastically cut. But many people do not practice and use

There are some reasons for the problem. The first reason is that the effects of the thrown rubbish are very dangerous and extremely harmful. According to Miller (1987), global industrial organizations produce over 80,000 different chemicals (para. 5). Basically, garbage is old, dirty and wet, so that it is a perfect place for bacteria and other viruses to stay in. Rubbish growth in cities has been a problem all over the world for centuries. Landfills have always been regarded as sources of illnesses and unpleasant smells. The harmful wastes from the garbage spread through the ground from paint, chemicals, petrol, batteries, and other toxic materials that have been thrown away into the garbage. The toxic chemicals get into the water pipes and spread through the people’s drinking water. Another reason of that problem is that people have created all these disasters, which are connected with environmental pollution. The more modern technologies are created, the more unbelievable become wastes and remains of what is produced. From this, man is responsible for what he or she created and for the following consequences. Anxieties about the environment have made people more aware of their environmental footprints or the kind of waste they leave behind during their existence. The difficulty is that an average person leaves an incredible amount of wastes in his or her lifetime. According to Lovejoy (1912), all biodegradable substances, contained in

American citizens throw away millions of tons of garbage each year, and this trash has to go somewhere. While there are projects underway to clean and reuse this refuse most of it gets dumped into huge landfills. These landfills are disgusting festering blisters on our country's landscape. But people continue to consume and throw away more and more in the name of convenience. As they see it, when things get old, throw it away and get a new one. They blame the government for the trash problem, but the truth blame should be placed on themselves.