By Avalon Theisen
Do you know how much waste leaves your house every day and goes to landfills or incinerators? Kids, like adults, may not think too much about the amount of trash we produce — or where it goes when we throw it “away.”
You’d be surprised at how quickly it adds up though. An EPA study from 2008 shows Americans produce an average of 4.5 pounds of trash daily per person, and that only 33%, or 1.5 pounds, is recycled or composted. Some scientists believe we could divert, or change the path of, more than 70% of waste by recycling and reusing it. Obviously landfills and incinerators pose some environmental threats, so how do we improve our ratio of trash to recycling or reusing? What can kids do to help?
I asked some of my friends and family to help me with a project that had two goals. The first goal was to see how much recyclable, compostable and trash material leaves our homes each week. The second goal was to see how much trash they could divert to recycling and composting if they really put their minds to it.
To make the process easy, I made a chart showing groups of common household items that are often thrown away, but could be recycled or composted. The chart might change depending on the county or city where you live because not all places recycle the same things at the same places. For example, in our county, we can’t recycle all plastics curbside. For items such as electronics, chemicals and batteries, we have special drop off locations because they need to be disposed of with special care. So another benefit of the chart is that it helps remind you what the rules are where you live.
To see how much difference we can make, we weighed our trash and recycling one week without doing anything differently from what we’ve always done. The second week, we looked at every item to see if there was any way to recycle, reuse or compost it.
To weigh a group of items for the project, combine them in a lightweight bag or other container, weigh it and record it on the chart. Since they are such a big problem in the environment, I also included a line for the number of new plastic shopping bags that came into the house over the week.
It turned out that we create even more trash than the EPA’s “average” — about 5.74 pounds per person per day – and recycle or compost only 17%, or 1 pound, of it. The exciting news is that after tracking our trash for one week, our recycling and composting skyrocketed to 64%, or 3.66 pounds per person per day!
It sounds difficult and complicated, but it really wasn’t. Everything on the chart was very easy to change, such as putting food scraps in a container to compost instead of just dumping them in a trashcan. (Our next column will probably focus on how kids can grow their own food using those food scraps as compost!)
One other important thing we learned from tracking trash: even though the participating families used reusable bags occasionally, an average of 11 plastic shopping bags still entered their homes weekly. So if 572 plastic bags come into a house every year, think how many plastic shopping bags you could save (or should I say “rescue”) yearly with just a few reusable shopping bags!
If we all share in the responsibility of decreasing the amount of waste that goes into landfills and incinerators, then eventually we may be able to reach zero waste. To start your own Pounds to Ounces Zero Waste Project, visitwww.ConserveItForward.org.
Avalon Theisen created ConserveItForward.com to help other kids learn how to protect their environment and has earned numerous awards for her efforts. Now 11 years old, she’s a 2012 recipient of the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes for people who have made a significant positive difference to people and our planet.
Originally published Fall 2012