As a follow up to yesterday’s post detailing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) most recent Toxics report, comes today’s Five Friday Facts. The EPA compared many of the 2010 figures to 2000. The facts below come from Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins (the latter two are co-founders of the Rocky Mountain Institute). Their book, published in 1999, gives a good idea as to the vast waste produced during industrial processes at the end of the previous century.
- Fresh Kills – the world’s largest dumping ground, located in Staten Island, New York – provided a repository for the daily garbage of New York City’s boroughs. The landfill receives 26 million pounds of commercial and household waste per day. Covering four square miles and rising more than a hundred feet high, it contains 2.9 billion cubic feet of trash, consisting of 100 million tons of newspaper, paint cans, potato peels, polystyrene clamshells, chicken bones, soggy breakfast cereals, cigarette butts, Coke cans, dryer lint, and an occasional corpse. As massive as it is, it takes in just 0.018 percent of the waste generated in the United States daily. Americans and American industry create or dispose of an additional 5,500 times as much solid waste elsewhere.
