A Less Trashy Austin: Zero Waste Program Reduces What Goes into Our Landfills

We modern Americans create a lot of waste — by contrast, our ancestors left behind very little.

Nearly every scrap of food was eaten, if not by humans then by their animals, and the rest composted back into the soil. Broken things were mended. Barely 50 years ago, people bought few packaged goods. They drank coffee at home, in a cup that they washed, and bought bars of soap, not plastic containers of body wash.

Bottled drinks came in glass bottles that were returnable — and they weren’t nearly as popular as they are now. Water came from the tap, water fountains or, on my childhood camping trips, a five-gallon container.

Today, Americans produce, on average, nearly 4.5 pounds of waste per day, per person, according to the EPA.

The vast majority of this is packaging for hard goods and food, papers and plastic beverage containers, and it all ends up in our area landfills — the rest lies along roadsides, in parks and in creeks, as litter.

Landfills are expensive to create and maintain, and they come with a host of environmental problems, from chemicals leaching into groundwater to gases escaping into the air. In fact, according to the city, landfills are one of the largest sources of methane, a greenhouse gas 21 to 75 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

In 2009, the Austin City Council passed a Zero Waste Plan with the goal of reducing the amount of waste sent to area landfills 90 percent by 2040. Austin Resource Recovery — the new, snazzier name slapped on the former Solid Waste Services department — set the bar higher, shooting for that 90 percent reduction by 2030.

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Source: Culture Map
By Melissa Gaskill