Each American Sends Five Pounds of Trash Each Day to Landfills

High-quality roll-off dumpster rentals can help the customers who already know in advance that they’ll be generating a lot of bulky garbage as part of a major outdoor project. A standard 30-yard dumpster is capable of holding five tons. The smallest available dumpster will still probably be a 10-yard dumpster, and these containers are still large enough for the equivalent of 50 13-gallon garbage bags.

However, the best waste management companies can help individuals who may need some assistance with bulk garbage disposal more consistently. A bulk pickup service can show up 12 to 24 times every year. When customers read about these services, they’ll find out about the specific bulk trash pick up dates. They shouldn’t miss any of these days, since it should still usually be the exact same date each month. Most customers will find it relatively easy to plan ahead and make sure that they’ve gathered all the trash that needs to be taken.
Customers who are trying to have bulky waste taken away may wonder whether a particular item will meet the requirements. Certain plumbing fixtures, including sinks, bathtubs, and toilets, are usually covered. These services will certainly answer questions about almost any important product.

It should going without saying, but recycling has a real and positive environmental impact. For every one ton of paper recycled, 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, and 7,000 gallons of water are saved. For every single aluminum can that gets recycled, enough energy to listen to a full album on your iPod is saved. Recycling 100 cans could light your bedroom for two whole weeks.

Yet, Americans continue to fill up landfills, and twice as fast as the federal government previously estimated, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

For years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) relied on estimates to determine how much trash landfills were getting, but in 2010, the EPA required most municipal landfills to measure and report how much waste was heading into the dumps, as part of an effort to reduce heat-trapping methane emissions.

Yale University researchers analyzed the records of over 1,200 landfills and calculated amounts, predominantly based on weights. The EPA estimated that in 2012, landfills took in 135 million tons of garbage, based on estimates of what businesses told the government indirectly. Using the actual measurements from effort to reduce methane emissions, the researchers calculated that they took in 289 million tons that year, more than twice the estimate.

In 2013, the researchers figured that the amount of waste sent to landfills rose to 294 million tons. That’s 1,871 pounds of trash per person. In other words, the U.S. throws more than five pounds of trash per person each day on average into landfills.

Not only does this mean that Americans are throwing away more trash than previously thought, it means that there are higher amounts of methane emissions.

“We’ve got a lot of waste going into landfills, more than what’s been reported before,” said Jon Powell of Yale’s Center for Industrial Ecology. “What that means for the long term is that we’re going to have greater emissions.”

This past August, the EPA introduced tougher methane emission restrictions for landfills with the goal of cutting emissions by 480,000 tons per year by 2025, but each American has to do her or his part, too. And it starts with recycling.