Okay, we’re not going to waste your time here *pun seriously intended*. But what we do want to do is talk about waste, and why it’s got us buzzing over here at Pop Pulse! Have you ever checked this out? With all of these people being added to the world on a daily – millisecond – basis, it’s hard to imagine how much waste we actually produce. So we’re going to break it down for y’all!

“Waste and wastes implies unwanted or unusable materials.”

Specifically, if we’re talking about a consumerist, capitalist, market economy, (like that of this glorious nation that we’re based in), we’re speaking in terms of supply and demand. This means that the consumers in the market are making the rules about what is being produced. And naturally, when man is able to pick and choose, the overbearing flaws any system are amounted to human error. In this case, I’ll compare it to the the ” eyes bigger than your stomach” effect.

Now, if you didn’t have grandparents like mine, I’ll break it down for you: Grandma bakes a pumpkin pie, I love pumpkin pie, so I go up and get three slices… Unfortunately my 12 year old stomach can only handle maybe one slice, so the other two contaminated pieces are thrown away (lets pretend my parents weren’t human garbage disposals). With that analogy in mind, it’s easier to understand why so much waste is produced in our country. But just how much waste are we talking? And why should anyone care? Well don’t worry, we’re getting there.

If we’re talking about one person and their day-to-day pumpkin pie struggles, along with product packaging and everything else that produces waste, well they typically produce 4.3 pounds of waste per day. So if we reference that population tallier from earlier, we’ve got about 1376000000 lbs of waste a day in the U.S. given that each individual balances that mass out for each other. That’s 3060 statues of liberty in mass, just for a bit of perspective.

So just where do we put all of that waste? Well, the majority of our nation’s waste is either distributed to landfills, or combusted. The problem with the former, is that we get air pollution and ground water pollution. As we should know by now, humans are a contributor to the issue of greenhouse gases — in particular, methane and carbon dioxide. These gases have harmful effects to the environment and climate.  Older landfills that were constructed before recent legal constraints lack liners to prevent chemicals from leaching into the surrounding groundwater – therefore contaminating drinking and crop water. Not to mention, landfills are visually displeasing.

So unless we change something… we obviously have a problem.