Trash Talk

A significant part of any consumerist society is waste. We generate a lot of garbage. Not just physical waste, the natural casting off of unusable matter from our digestive and respiratory functions, but actual rubbish. We throw away a lot of trash per day. 

When you stop to think about it—I mean really consider our propensity to generate refuse—the resulting reality can be absolutely staggering. It is a problem with immediate consequences and the human race is ill-prepared to make the requisite changes both in regard to how much trash we produce and how lucrative waste management has become.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the average American adult throws away about five pounds (two kilograms) of trash per day. This includes, but is not limited to wrappers, facial tissue, food packaging and scraps, newspaper, bottles (plastic and glass), paper towels, diapers, toilet tissue, plastic bags, cardboard, household products like toiletry containers, paper and foam food and drinkware, cartons, tea bags and coffee grounds among much, much else.

Keeping with the EPA's averages, then, a household of five, like ours, generates about twenty-five pounds of trash per day. Our garbage pickup is once per week, so every seven days, our family produces about 175 pounds of trash. This is roughly the poundage of a fully-grown adult male. 

That's just on average. Like with all human activities, the averages fluctuate. Throughout the year, our rubbish habits ebb and flow. At Christmas, one of the most wasteful times of the year, our individual average jumps from five pounds to 6.25 pounds per day. For my family, that's about 218 pounds per week. That is—considering I eat a lot during the holidays—a well-fed Dave-made-of-garbage per week going to the landfill just from our address. 

That's a lot of garbage.

Assuming that Asheboro's 2022 census population numbers are accurate, there are about 27,000 people in our small town. That means, all things being equal (and they're not) on average, Asheboroans throw out about 135,000 pounds of trash per day, 945,000 pounds per week and just shy of fifty million pounds per year. Talk about rubbish!

Of course other factors are in play. Asheboro isn't just residences. There are restaurants, businesses, production companies, mills, schools, churches, libraries, funeral homes, tattoo parlors, consignment and antique stores, animal rescue and veterinary resources, doctors offices, dentists, standalone surgery wards, a hospital and several dozen automotive repair shops. All of these businesses produce way more garbage than the average household does. All of it compiles and aside from specialized collection (like for tires, used motor oil, hypodermic needles, unused medicines, narcotics and biohazard waste) it goes to the landfill. Likewise, poverty levels within the community tend to play a role as well. The more money a town generates, the more unhoused people tend to reside there. Surprisingly, poor and homeless people generate far less trash than wealthier people. But it’s not just this simple. It never is.

The more money you make, again, on average, the more you can afford to throw out and be wasteful. Poor populations tend to use way more of what they purchase, resulting in much less waste and garbage overall. Though, garbage does pile up around homeless camps and tent cities, this is because the unhoused don't settle where trash pickup routes are run and the trash trucks won't stop outside of established lines.

Luckily, Asheboroans enjoy trash and recycling pickup that is entirely revenue based. The few dollars we pay per month on our water bill that goes for garbage collection actually allows the roughly 20 million dollars per year to be paid for by citizens. Even so, our landfill is spreading and getting larger and piling higher by quite a lot each day and each week.

There are some ideas about how to curtail waste generation locally, but they are expensive ideas and expensive ideas are usually unpopular. We don't want to think about just how much trash we make, because that constitutes a need for change. But something ought to be done. A high rate of garbage production implies a high rate of carbon emissions, since it takes fuel to destroy, burn and transport trash. Even just the process of decomposition at an average landfill produces enough greenhouse gasses to match a small town, meaning that a town like Asheboro generates twice the greenhouse gasses, because of our landfill.

One idea actually employed by some cities is to have a fine associated with excess garbage production. The more waste a town or city produces, the higher city-charged rates will be. So these towns are charging high waste producers (including residents) higher fees for larger than normal amounts of refuse. This is why it costs $20 to dump a couch or a fridge, but before, people used to get paid to dump metal or white goods. Now, the cities are charging more, forcing residents and companies to think hard about their waste production. In other cases, some towns are paying for trash pickup. If you are an unhoused resident, the litter you bring in will get you money that can be put toward housing vouchers and rent discounts or straight up cash.

All of this considers that the trash we generate all falls within a neatly regulated waste stream from our rubbish bins to the landfill. This is a common but fairly naive perspective. One of the biggest and most pressing environmental issues we deal with as a society is the problem of trash outside the system of collection and management. If you ever drive down the highway and see bags of garbage along the shoulders, you know what I’m referring to. Residents who don't have municipal garbage pickup services included in their city fees—usually those who live too far out in the interior—have to pay exorbitant amounts for trash pickup. Sometimes trash is discarded or just tossed into the wild places or the fringes of highways and other back roads, just to get rid of it.

Off the grid pickup fees can be conditional, and some companies prorate costs by averaging several homes within a given area together. You may be a single individual who only puts out your garbage bin once every two weeks, but your neighbors, who have three children, two dogs, two cats, grandma and Uncle Jimmy, all who stay on the property, may generate three or four times your output. That can drive up the cost of non-municipal waste management. For people on a fixed income, this is deeply expensive to manage.

Households that cannot afford the fees (or who just don't want to deal with garbage pick up at all) find not-so-clever ways to make their garbage someone else's problem. One of the biggest problems in our humble county is litter: people dump incredible amounts of refuse into our two major rivers. Each year, teams of volunteers roam the accessible edges of both the Uwharrie and Deep rivers, dredging up huge piles of garbage. Everything from tossed out furniture to toilets to washers, dryers, vehicles, cast offs from cars and homes located near these waterways makes it to the rivers, jamming them with junk, poisoning fish and wildlife, mucking up parks and ruining the view.

And that's not even close to all. Refuse and residue from regular home and car maintenance, lawn care, owning pets and small livestock, all create residue that washes downstream from our homes into the storm collection systems and into the rivers and streams near us. A strong downpour can propel oil drips on your driveway into the closest river in just a few hours. Pollutants in our water systems not only devastate local fish and wildlife populations, but chemicals from streets, lawns and driveways contaminate lakes that feed the city reservoir system. It clearly behooves us to think before we toss, pour, drip, spray or broadcast.

Cigarette butts are one of the most common and devastatingly deadly bits of garbage you can "flick" into nature. The environmental equivalent of lighting a stick of dynamite and throwing it into your friend's 1,000 gallon aquarium, cigarette filters clog the bottom of rivers and streams. They eke deadly chemicals into the water, while providing a brightly-colored distraction for fish and other aquatic fauna (like turtles) who ingest the recently-smoked butts mistaking them for food. Improperly doused gaspers flung carelessly by campers, hikers, vagrants or from the window of a passing automobile can ignite pine straw and kindle into huge wildfires. They are (the butts, not the wildfires) the most littered item in the world.

As if all this eye-popping, brain hinge-busting data wasn’t bad enough, on the global level, the human propensity to produce garbage is rapidly swallowing our planet whole. Wealthier countries export their garbage to poorer countries in Asia and Africa in a kind of dirty colonialism, spreading the problem around rather than cleaning it up. This is lucrative for waste management companies, who profit by the pound and ton. According to The World Counts.com, we currently need 1.8 Earths (complete, whole planet Earths, including all the space for water and mountains) to contain the waste we are producing annually at the global scale. The counter at this website is racing toward 1.9.

Arresting as this reality may be, our garbage problem doesn’t stop on the surface of the planet. Our immediate orbit is jammed with garbage left over from old satellites, space flight equipment, rocket segments, fuel tanks, nuts, bolts and all kinds of other debris and detritus, forming a kind of floating shield. Space junk, as it is lovingly referred to, is a byproduct of our scientific and technological advancement, certainly. But we’re rapidly creating a chainlink fence of trash in the sky, making launching rockets and other spacebound vehicles a dangerous option. Right now, the risk of hitting space junk during a maneuver (space flight or landing) is about 1:10,000. This is roughly the odds of being injured by a toilet, being born with spina bifida or finding a pearl while shucking a random oyster, but here’s the thing: those odds are rising steadily. Every year, more space junk winds up in orbit, requiring roughly 25 debris-avoidance maneuvers since 1999. Thos odds are way better than getting attacked by a Great White shark (1:3.75 million) or winning an Oscar (1:11,000).

What all this means is probably very clear. Short of packing up the trash and shipping it via rocket into the sun, which might actually be viable, we’re creating a planet of trash. Disease carrying vermin like mice and rats absolutely love garbage, and since our beautiful planet is being covered with junk, it’s only a matter of time before those vermin become more prevalent, dripping with diseases and bacteria, wiping out whole ecosystems as they grow. The garbage we do produce is creating far more greenhouse gasses than we would naturally produce; forget about cow belches, what about shoe boxes, paper plates, the plastic trash bags we use to contain it all? 

Waste, junk, trash, rubbish, garbage, refuse, detritus, litter, scrap, swill, muck, dross, dreck, grot, draff; whatever you call it, whatever you throw away is contributing to a problem that will overflow and collapse into our daily lives. Our means of dealing safely with trash is precariously balanced at the local level, but at the global level, things are not so pristine. We’re in a world of trouble and every time we throw away a bit of plastic wrap, a drinking straw or the cup the cold drink came in, we’re contributing to the devastation of our planet.

We really need to think about how much we throw away.