What a Waste

How much garbage do you create every day? How often do you buy new things? If you look at the facts about how much people buy and throw away, it’s pretty shocking.

• If everyone lived like an average American, it would take five or six planets to provide all of necessary resources.
• Each individual creates about 1.5 tons of solid waste per year. That’s about 4.5 pounds (~4 kg) a day and 90,000 pounds of trash in a lifetime.
• Every product leaves a trail of waste before it even hits the shelves at a store. For example, the amount of trash created to make a laptop computer is close to 4,000 times its weight.
• Each year 352 million pounds of plastic are thrown into the ocean, killing about 1 million sea creatures.
• Eighty percent of what Americans buy ends up in the trash within six months.

There is only one planet Earth. It has a limited amount of resources and a limited amount of space for garbage. People can’t continue to live this way, and the planet is starting to make that clear. Forests are disappearing, the atmosphere is warming up, and everything is becoming polluted and dirty. It’s time to start to clean things up by shopping our wasteful ways. What can each person do to stop wasting so much? Do you buy things you don’t need? What have you thrown away recently?