What Happens to My Trash After It’s Thrown Away?
Almost every day we throw our trash into the bins, but have you ever thought what will happen next? In fact, when you toss something in the trash, it does not simply “disappear”, as you might wish. Instead, your waste must go somewhere when they leave your home or office. So in this article, I would show you where exactly the trash go and what impact it will have.
Usually the garbage will be collected by large trucks with compactors on the back of them. Followed by that, the first place that the garbage goes is a transfer station, where your wastes will be sorted and categorized. Depending on types of the trash, the destination of their final journey would vary.
Maybe the best-case scenario is to be recycled. Wastes like paper products, furniture, clothing, and plastic bottles can be recycled by turning them into new products to be used a second time. Recyclable products are selected either by automatic streamline or human labor. One example of recycling is that aluminum cans can be selected and used to create more beverage cans or even functioned as materials of window frames. Recycling is the most preferred option for waste processing because this conserves resources and improve the utilization rate of items, posing the least harm to the environment.
However, not all trash can be recycled. In fact, some of unrecycable waste are burned, some organic ones are composted, but the majority is sent into landfills where they are buried. Landfills are composed of compacted clay soil on the bottom and sides to prevent groundwater contamination due to leakage of polluted water from trash. Your trash is poured into a 30-to-150-meter-deep landfill and then compressed and stored in cells between layers of liners. Each day, they will be frequently covered with several inches of dirt and soil on the top of exposed trash to reduce the odor and problems of insects. It also ensures loose wastes don’t get blown or washed away.
Wastes would break themselves down over a long time span in the landfills. This is called decomposition, which means chemical bonds that hold materials together are disintegrated and the material breaks into simpler substance. The initial decomposition of organic wastes occurs under aerobic conditions. However, shortly after waste is buried in the landfill, oxygen availability becomes limited and anaerobic generation of methane and carbon dioxide, the two main components of landfill gas, begin to increase as degradation enters the transient phase.
Although landfills can serve an important purpose when they are properly designed and managed under strict regulations, especially nowadays when tons of trash are generated within a day in one community, it is still undeniable that there are many limitations of landfills. While decomposing trash in landfills, greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide is emitted, causing global warming. Also, landfills inevitably bring harmful effect to nearby soil and takes up scarce lands that could be used to grow crops or build houses under the situation of growing population. To put it in a nutshell, the best way we can do to solve waste problems is to “reduce, reuse, and recycle”, minimizing the amount of waste that needs to be disposed, leaving a clean and healthy environment for all.
