A Story of Time and Materials

Everyday we produce garbage, trash and throw away what we don’t use anymore.

The average person produces about 4.5 pounds of trash per day, and most of it is comprised of recyclable items.

From a sustainability perspective, it's important to know how long it takes various types of garbage to decompose. This way, we can focus our efforts especially on reducing the consumption of products that generate waste materials that take a long time to completely break down and also throwing the real garbage where it’s supposed to go.

Let’s review how long it takes for various waste categories to decompose in landfills:

Plastic bags - from 10 to 1,000 years

Plastic products are very common in our modern life, but also, an item of waste that takes too long to decompose.

Normally, plastic items can take up to 1,000 years to decompose in landfills. Even plastic bags we use in our everyday life take from 10 to 1,000 years to decompose, and plastic bottles can take 450 years or more.

*Source: https://bit.ly/3MCLsC2?

Aluminum cans - 80-100 years

Over 81,000 cans per minute were recycled in America in 2019. But, at the same time, in every three-month period, enough aluminum cans and packaging are thrown away to rebuild the entire American commercial air fleet.

*Source: https://bit.ly/3kmxiJk?

Glass -? a million years

Glass should be very easy to recycle due to the fact that it's made of sand. By simply breaking down the glass and melting it, we can produce new glass.

However, the shocking fact is that if glass is thrown away in landfills, it takes a million years to decompose - according to some sources, it doesn’t decompose at all.

*Source: https://bit.ly/3kjI1nF????

Paper waste - decades

Paper is the largest element in solid waste. Usually takes two to six weeks in a landfill to get completely decomposed, but can take decades, depending on moisture levels within the landfill.

That is why recycling paper items can save a lot of landfill space while also reducing the energy and virgin material usage demanded by making non-recycled paper.

*Source: https://bit.ly/39h1Yt3