US is the number one producer of garbage on the planet

[donsu]

http://www.alternet.org/story/27456/

The Hidden Life of Garbage

-snip-

It is not a shock that the United States is the number one producer of garbage on the planet; with just 5 percent of the global population we generate 30 percent of the world's trash. The average American throws away a staggering 4.5 pounds of rubbish daily -- that's 1,600 pounds each year, according to Rogers. And garbage is also a global problem; today the middle of the Pacific Ocean is six times more abundant with plastic waste than zooplankton.

So how did we get to this point? Garbage production doubled in the U.S. over the past 30 years, yet waste is increasingly hidden, and the focus on recycling is fading along with it. Rogers says this situation came about through an alignment of manufacturing and marketing forces, combined with goals of the mega-garbage collection companies like Waste Management and Browning Ferris, and even some environmental laws which ended up helping the mega-companies.

-snip-

It's interesting about that term, the "waste stream." It sanitizes the idea of discard, it's like, it's just this "stream" ... it's just an innocuous thing that's sort of naturally occurring. The levels of waste that we produce in a free market system are by no means the natural outcome of some organic process. They're the product of choices that have been made in many ways by manufacturers to boost consumption and to boost profits. In terms of these flows, you don't have consumption if you don't have wasting. You don't have expanding markets if you don't have increasing levels of consumption. So, in order to have continued intensified growth, you have to have continued, intensified wasting.

-snip-

Unfortunately, Hurricane Katrina revealed that all of these issues are very much at the forefront of what's going on. What happened in the Gulf Coast is awful to see, but it lays bare the reality of the situation. Toxic wastes are being dumped on the poorest communities, and often they're communities of color, and those problems are exacerbated by global warming. All these issues are connected to issues of poverty and inequality. They produce each other. They exacerbate each other.
-snip-
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[enigma000]

1. The US economy is 25% of the world's total

You would expect something close to 30% of the trash.

[montanacowboy]

2. And that does not include the garbage

that comes out of the mouths of the administration and all the garbage out from the media whores

[expatriot]

3. God don't make no junk, but he's gotta shit somewhere. nt

[ck4829]

4. We have the best landfills in the world

:sarcasm:

[Benhurst]

5. At least we're number one in something. We're number 42, an honor

shared with Slovenia, when it comes to to health care for our citizens.

[cliss]

6. I read an ugly statistic recently:

we use about 25% of the world's supply of petroleum. We use almost 30% of the world's natural resources.

If the rest of the world tried to live like we do, we would need 4 PLANETS to do that.

And we're not 5% of the world's population, either. We're only about 3.8%. Unbelievable. There's a certain barnyard animal that comes to mind.