Americans and Garbage

Garbage is defined as anything worthless, useless, or discarded. Unfortunately, Americans are professionals at producing trash. In fact, the average American household throws out four and a half pounds of trash each day, and collectively we produce 243 million tons of trash within a year (Smith). The problem of trash production has been around for ages, but it has continued to be ignored by the general population.

Producing exceeding amounts of trash does not bother the majority of Americans, or they are unaware of the problem, otherwise the mind-blowing statistics would not exist. A major reason people produce large quantities of trash is out of pure laziness. For example, my roommate threw out a toaster because she had received a new one, and after she was questioned why she did not donate the toaster, her response was, “That is too much work.” Donating this toaster would have required her to exert extra effort and time that she was not willing to use. Often times, it is the same dilemma for recycling which sometimes requires a person to drive and personally place the recyclable products in the bins. People are not willing to utilize a minute amount of effort in order to help conserve the earth. However, much of this could be due to the fact that people do not realize how big of a problem trash production is.

In larger cities such as New York City and Cleveland, Ohio, there are trash police, also called the green police. The local governments of several larger cities have placed computer chips on recycling and trash bins. These computer chips allow the government to monitor and observe who is participating and to what extent with the recycling. Some cities use the chips to figure out areas of the community that have low recyc...

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