Canada Waste Watching: Your Garbage and Your Footprint
This post was prepared and published with the help of environmentally concerned members of Roll Off Dumpster Rentals Depot: Dumpster Rentals in Hamilton , ON, Dumpster Rentals in Calgary , AB, and Roll Off Containers Halifax , NS.
Do you have any idea how big your garbage footprint is? And what kind of waste you create? Start with your bedroom. What do you throw out? How often do you empty your wastebasket? What about garbage in other parts of your house -the kitchen, family room, bathroom? How about the garden? As gross as it sounds, can you name the kinds and amounts of waste you make? A typical North American family's household garbage bags are about '" one-third organics (food scraps, garden trimmings); * one-third paper products (cardboard, newspapers, fine papers); one-fifth metals, glass, and plastics; the rest, a mishmash of old clothes, carpets, shoes, bedding, sofas, chairs, cabinets, computers, radios, tires, drywall, lumber, flooring, pet hair, dust, batteries, household cleaners, paint, and so on....
If you live in Canada, chances are your household creates close to one ton of garbage a year. If you count the waste created in extracting, manufacturing, transporting, and using what you throwaway, your family could be linked to more than 18 metric tons (20 tons) each year. Multiply that by all the people in your community and you can see why garbage is an enormous part of oversized footprints.
Any waste that is reused or recycled cuts back on the amount Nature has to absorb. And the more you stop wasting in the first place, the more you reduce your mark on Nature. "Re"-thinking garbage can trim your oversized ecological footprint. And lots of people are "re"-thinking. The city of Toronto has run a curbside blue box program for many years. At first, families sorted glass bottles, metal cans, plastic bottles, newspapers, and cardboard from their regular garbage for recycling. After the success of the blue box, the city added a gray box for newspapers, cardboard, and household paper waste, including fine paper, junk mail, and flyers. Then the city gave a green bin to households for biodegradables. Those households still carry nearly a metric ton (1 ton) of waste to their curbsides a year, but well over half is sorted and recovered for recycling and composting.
- Published: 2013-01-01T07:43:19-08:00
- Author: Laura Schmidt, Dumpster Rentals Customer Supp
