19 Facts about Waste Management, Recycling, and our Future in 2019

Combing through data from the last year, here are a few interesting facts about waste management and recycling you might not be aware of.

 The average Canadians throws away approximately three pounds of waste each day.
 Analyzing the household waste we throw away, 38 percent of which is paper, 18 percent are plants, eight percent is metal, eight percent is plastics, glass is seven percent, food is seven percent, wood is seven percent, and ‘other’ is seven percent.

 In many developed nations, disposable diapers are a huge problem in crowded landfills. They produce a large volume of methane gas and take centuries to break down.
 A single garbage bag of regular household garbage has the potential to generate as much electricity as a bag of coal.
 In the future, a lot of the world’s metals and coals will have been used up. In response to this, we may have to go mine old landfill sites to search resources thrown out centuries prior.
 Animal waste is very common on farms. When it’s not composted or utilized as a natural fertilizer, it can be dried and burned to produce electricity.
 Limestone filters in power station chimneys require regular replacement. Although this produces a lot of limestone waste, it can be utilized as a fertilizer. In the United States alone, 100 million tons of limestone waste is produced every year. If used properly, it would be enough to fertilize up to 25 percent of their farmland.
 The fuel rods and nuclear reactor parts that have become worn out are evidently extremely radioactive. They have to be buried deep underground in steel containers, surrounded by concrete. It make take thousands of years for them to not be so radioactive.
 The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident remains the worst that has ever happened, producing a radioactive cloud and rains which fell in parts of Europe, contaminating grasslands and farms as far away as the UK.
 Beluga whales are highly toxic creatures and when they wash up on shore, they need to be treated similar to toxic waste. That’s because of how polluted our oceans are with chemicals and the amount of contaminated fish belugas are known to eat.
 In Canada and the United States, we recycle approximately 28 percent of all the waste we create.
 It takes 20 times the energy to manufacture a new aluminum can than it is to re-manufacture one from an older can.
 In the United States, the average person uses 660 pounds of paper every year – twice as much as what’s used in the UK and 100 times as much as people living in India.
 In Canada, every year, 700,000 cars are scraped each year. A large part of a car’s components, including metal and some plastics, are recyclable.
 Every year in Canada, 25 million tires are thrown away. Of these, 40 percent are sent to landfills, 22 percent are recycled, 16 percent are reused, 10 percent are retreaded, and 3 percent are used in various engineering projects.
 More than half of all steel cans manufactured in North America are recycled. They are one of the most popular products to recycle.
 In the last 20 years, grocery-store packaging has become on-average 30 percent lighter in weight – this has helped to cut down on waste production and has saved energy.
 300 million tons of steel are recycled every year, saving more than 200 million tons in iron ore and 90 million tons in coal.
 New steel and aluminum cans manufactured in North America contain approximately 25 percent recycled material.