Every day Americans generate about 1.35 billion pounds (612 million kilograms) of trash every day. To put that in perspective a typical blue whale weighs about 100 tons, hence The United States throws away about 6,750 blue whales worth of garbage every day. This translates out to about 251 million tons of Trash every year. To put that figure in perspective, the Titanic weighed 46, 239 gross tons (47,027 metric tons), thus we throw away 4,837 Titanics worth of solid waste every month.

Most of this trash is either put into a dump or a landfill. A dump is an exposed hole in the ground where the trash is buried. Dumps are infested with rats, birds, and mice. A landfill is a more sanitary dump where clay or plastic walls are used to separate the trash from the environment (though few of these are used).

Also trash in a landfill takes thousands of years to decompose. To concretize that fact the EPA estimates that most plastic in landfills will not start to decompose for another 1000 years. Glass takes millions of years to decompose, so that Glass bottle of salsa or lemonade you threw out? It’s gonna be in your local dump for a couple of million years! Did you know that every three months, Americans throw away enough aluminium cans to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet? Aluminium cans in landfills can take anywhere from 88 - 200 years to decompose. New papers take about 6 months to decompose, but wouldn’t it be easier to simply recycle them? The worst is Styrofoam, it take more than a million years to decompose, so your take out containers are gonna be in landfills / dumps for millions of years from now.

To combat this problem one could recycle but a biodegradable packaging is just as effective. Biodegradable plastic, aluminium etc. takes a couple of years to degrade which is a reasonable amount of time. This type of packaging also has many advantages, such as that it degrades into the most basic forms of matter and thus degrades into fresh soil that helps the environment. It also can be used as a renewable fuel source or an agent in ethanol.

Biodegradable packaging works by using living micro organisms to speed up the breakdown process of decomposition. So that pizza box you threw out? It will shave hundreds of thousands of years of the average decomposition time.

With widespread use of Biodegradable packaging we could significantly reduce the amount of trash that is left in landfills by Americans and contribute to a healthier environment. The UK which has already adopted this method, now shaves more than 30 million tons of their trash footprint due to Biodegradable technologies. About 4 million of this is used to make compost for agriculture and there are plans to increase this figure to 17 million by 2017.

With widespread adoption of this technology America would become a cleaner country. Our farmers would have a larger supply of compost. Decomposition times for trash would reduce immensely and trash companies could divert more resources to recycling. Biodegradable tech holds one of the keys to America’s pollution, trash, energy, and agricultural problems.

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