Landfills What a Load of Garbage!

Landfills What a Load of Garbage!

Trash in the Past Thousands of years ago, people living in the ancient city of Troy (in modern-day Turkey) threw their garbage on their floors. When the floors grew filthy enough, the people would put another layer of earth on top to bury the garbage. The Trojans piled so many layers of trash on their floors, they had to raise the roofs of their houses! You may laugh, but what we do today isn't so different. Ancient or modern, people still have to figure out what to do with their trash.

Trash Today Today, most people do not throw garbage on the floors or in the middle of the street. Instead, we put it in trash cans, the garbage truck hauls it away, and we forget about it. But where exactly is “ away?" When you put something in the garbage, it enters what is called the waste stream. The waste stream is the flow of garbage to its final location. Most of the garbage in the waste stream goes to landfills-areas of land set aside for burying trash.

How Much Trash Do We Create? The world creates more than 2. 6 trillion pounds (1. 2 trillion kg) of trash each year. That's about what 182 Great Pyramids of Egypt would weigh. Americans make up only 5 percent of the world's population but create 25 percent of the world's waste. The average American creates 4. 5 pounds (2 kg) of trash every day. Paper and paper products, such as cardboard packaging, make up a lot of what Americans toss.

Follow the Trash A garbage truck carries our trash to a landfill. The truck unloads the trash into a cell-a storage space for garbage. Then a heavy truck drives over the garbage with large, spiky wheels and smashes it down. At the end of the day, a bulldozer covers the trash with dirt so that it's less exposed to the elements. Burying the garbage also helps keep out wildlife and reduces the odor.

Building a Landfill Landfills vary in size. Usually, a gigantic hole is dug about 200 feet (61 m) wide and up to half a mile (805 m) deep. The garbage can't be dumped straight into the ground, though, because some of the garbage is toxic. As trash breaks down, its toxic parts mix with rainwater to produce leachate. Leachate is the often-toxic liquid that has drained, or leached, through the landfill. If you picture the landfill like a giant swimming pool, leachate is the liquid inside. If not collected and treated, the leachate will either drain through the bottom or overflow.