A Brief History of Waste

Many people have the mistaken belief that the accumulation of trash is a recent phenomenon. Since people have been around they have accumulated waste. In the past, many different cultures have been concerned with how to deal with human waste. Ancient societies, such as the Greeks, had even developed landfills and rules about the disposal of waste. However, before the Industrial Revolution trash was mostly compiled of organic materials that decomposed easily and other materials like fabrics and metals were often reused. During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century materials became more available and people started to throw away items that were previously difficult to obtain and often reused. As the human population and human waste increased, area available for garbage disposal decreased. It wasn’t until the late 1960’s that the United States government developed waste management laws and companies began to encourage recycling by buying back recyclable containers. In 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated, drawing attention to environmental issues such including recycling waste. Now, many people are aware of the environmental problems we face due to are carelessness with trash. Still, waste is a huge problem with our society. According to the EPA, the average American generated 4.62 pounds of waste per day in 2007.


The development of new technologies has helped to increase our harmful waste output. Technology has made many products more readily available making it unnecessary to reuse and the development of plastics and other manmade materials has caused human waste much less biodegradable. Human waste has also become less environmentally friendly due to new cleaning products and chemical processes which are toxic to the environment.


Along with the development of Earth Day there have been many campaigns to raise awareness about our effect on the environment. The 3R (reduce, recycle, reuse) campaign is an example of a huge campaign that brought awareness to the waste problem in America. The recent “Go Green” campaign has also help to bring attention to our trash output. However, these campaigns have little immediacy; the United States continues to be the most wasteful country in the world. Only about 10% of our garbage gets recycled. One of the most successful approaches to encourage recycling is the bottle deposit laws implemented by some states. Currently 11 states have placed a deposit on beverage containers, Oregon being the first to do so in 1972.


Some technological advances have been made to help reduce and recycle waste. The development of waste sorting plants has helped to reduce the amount of recyclable goods that find their way into landfills. This development helps to make up for people’s carelessness, but is not nearly as effective as the conscious effort to reduce waste.




More information about waste:

http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/index.htm

http://www.nrc-recycle.org/

http://www.ct.gov/dep/cwp/view.asp?a=2690&q=322434&depNav_GID=1639&depNav=