As much as you love your children, they grow out of one shoe size almost monthly. They’re outgrowing clothes just as quickly. You roast a turkey, and the carcass remains. Have you stopped to think about the issues you create when you send items to landfills instead of finding ways to recycle them?
Sadly, out of the 292.4 million tons of waste generated in the U.S. in 2018, only 32.1% was properly recycled or composted. Other items end up in the trash, where they slowly break down over years and decades.
Items like food, furniture, small appliances, and yard waste should be recycled, but people might not realize what’s recyclable and what isn’t. As items break down, they release water, fumes, and even microplastics. There’s a carbon cost associated with poor recycling rates.
The Reality About Landfill Emissions
Few people realize that the emissions produced by a landfill are equivalent to those from 24 million gas-powered vehicles driven for an entire year. Imagine if every Floridian (about 23.5 million residents) drove a car all year, and how toxic those exhaust fumes are for the environment. U.S. landfills create the same pollution.
Municipal solid waste (MSW) accounts for about 14% of the nation’s methane emissions tied to human activities. When people don’t recycle, greenhouse gas emissions are equal to about a year’s worth of trips in 24 million gas-powered vehicles.
Aerobic vs. Anaerobic Decomposition
Trash that goes to a landfill goes through four phases. The first phase is aerobic. Meaning oxygen is part of the process. In this stage, very little methane is produced during decomposition. Nitrogen and oxygen play major roles in this process, which lasts about a year.
The remaining three stages are anaerobic. Methane-producing bacteria begin their role in the decomposition process. Oxygen declines, and hydrogen and carbon dioxide increase in the second stage. In the third and fourth stages, hydrogen goes away, carbon dioxide stabilizes, methane increases, and nitrogen plummets.
In the fourth stage, carbon dioxide and methane are both in the 50% range. Both have indirect and direct impacts on people and the environment.
1. Carbon Dioxide:This greenhouse gas is prevalent because it enters the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels, the burning of wood, and the decomposition of waste. Plants absorb it, but there is more carbon dioxide than there are plants to absorb it. It takes over 74 million acres of young, healthy trees to absorb a year’s worth of carbon dioxide. Older trees don’t use it up as quickly.
2. Methane:This greenhouse gas has a 12-year lifespan and is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet. In addition to impacting the ozone layer, it’s also a short-lived climate pollutant that impacts crops and human health.
Landfill Leachate Adds to the Problem
Airborne emissions are an issue, but you also have the impact of water on the decomposing trash. Heavy rain may run off a pile of trash, flooding the landfill beyond its boundaries. Trash itself may contain water or generate heat that creates condensation. That condensate cannot go back into a stream, river, pond, lake, or ocean.
This liquid (leachate) must be processed as wastewater before it’s allowed to return to a sewer or other water source. The EPA requires landfills to have stormwater discharge permits.
Leachate is filtered from an MSW facility and stored in tanks, where it’s transported to an area wastewater treatment facility through sewer pipelines or tanker trucks or processed in a landfill’s onsite industrial wastewater treatment plant.
Microplastics are a Growing Concern
Leachates and greenhouse gases are major concerns, but microplastics are an increasing problem. Every plastic jar, container, bag, envelope, or tube that ends up in a landfill takes decades or even centuries to decompose. During this process, tiny plastic particles enter the air, soil, and water, where they are inhaled, absorbed by plants, or contaminate drinking water.
Wastewater treatment plants cannot remove all microplastics from treated water. Common processes such as UV oxidation and chlorination make plastic particles brittle, causing even small particles to break down further.
Filtration only captures particles up to a certain size. Membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology captures up to 99.9% of microplastics, making it the best option. Yet, some communities still rely on activated sludge systems.
Sewer or septic water is treated and released into bodies of water that supply water treatment plants. In a U.S. study, treated drinking water was found to contain up to 23 billion microplastic particles. Tap water contains over 5.5 particles per liter.
While you might think a few plastic particles aren’t that serious, it’s actually alarming. You’re not just shedding those particles through your digestive system; they’re entering your bloodstream and traveling to your heart, lungs, reproductive organs, and brain. There, they can settle with fatty deposits and contribute to blockages that damage your organs and threaten your life.
Worse, microplastics are disrupting the oceans’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Phytoplankton normally absorb carbon dioxide and transfer it to deeper layers of the ocean as part of the food chain.
Microplastics interfere with this process by harming zooplankton’s metabolism and making phytoplankton less active. As a result, carbon dioxide rises into the atmosphere, increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.
Start by Recycling Everything You Can
No one is perfect, but the more you recycle, the better it is for the environment. This means knowing what you can and cannot recycle and doing everything possible to ensure items are recycled. The six biggest mistakes with recycling are:
- Bagging recyclables in plastic shopping bags.
- Failing to wash or rinse foods and liquids from bottles, cans, and jars.
- Hoping that all items you put in a curbside bin will be recycled (wish-cycling).
- Ignoring local recycling rules.
- Placing plastic films in curbside recycling.
- Throwing out food waste instead of composting it properly.
To best protect the planet, make these six recycling habits part of your routine.
- Compost your vegetable scraps and coffee grounds. Use that compost in your gardens, around your trees, and in flower pots.
- Keep all paper products dry. If they become wet, use them to layer compost, sticks, and garden soil in a raised bed.
- Wash all glass, metal, and plastic jars, bottles, and recyclable containers with hot water and soap. Put the lids on, shake until no residue remains, then set aside to dry.
- Get a printout of items you can recycle in your curbside bin, and check it monthly to make sure nothing has changed.
- Set aside any recyclable items not on the list, and look them up on RecycleNation to find out where to take them.
- Repurpose as much as you can. For example, while you might not need a dozen glass yogurt containers, they can be invaluable to a carpenter for organizing nails, screws, and bolts. Old, torn clothing is also useful to quilters.
Taking the time to ensure that the items you recycle are included in your curbside recycling program makes a difference. Enter your ZIP code, choose the item you need to get rid of, and recycle properly using RecycleNation’s recycling tool.
