The first municipal dump was established in ancient Athens in 400 BC. Since then, humanity has only exacerbated the problem of waste accumulation. Recycling is an important issue in many developed countries, so we also couldn’t get past this topic
1. Over the last hundred years, the amount of waste has increased by 10,000%. Every day, people throw away hundreds of millions of plastic bottles, that will never decompose.
2. Waste dumps are packed so tightly that most of them are decomposed under anaerobic conditions (without air). This leads to the formation of large amounts of methane, which is considered to be one of the main reasons for global warming.
3. There are huge and constantly increasing garbage patches in the oceans. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic, which contains up to four million tons of garbage. The thickness in some places is more than 5 meters and completely blocks access to sunlight for living organisms in the ocean.
4. We need to think about what we will leave to our descendants, because even a plastic bag from a grocery store, if not recycled, will take hundreds of years to decompose.
5. People use around 5 trillion plastic bags per year worldwide, which require 500 million barrels of oil.
6. Producing recycled paper uses 60% less total energy than producing virgin paper and fewer forests will need to been cut down.
7. Many people don’t even think about how much they harm the environment. The cigarette butts will decompose completely only in 12-15 years and during all this time it will pollute the earth, to decompose the glass bottle will take to 1 million years.
