What Rubbish?

ACCORDING to the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States generates roughly 1,560 pounds of municipal solid waste per person per year. Composition studies of municipal solid waste reveal that it consists of between 34 and 59 per cent degradable carbon. Therefore, America’s population of about 269.6 million will have produced in 1997 about 210.3 million short tons of solid waste containing between 71.5 and 124 million tons of degradable carbon.

Other countries have waste-generation rates similar to the United States’. Assuming a world population of 5.8 billion, this implies about 4.5 billion tons of waste containing between 1.5 and 2.7 billion tons of carbon annually. In other words, appropriately constructed landfills could capture roughly 2 billion tons of carbon annually, thus stopping global warming cold.

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Craig S. Marxsen

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ACCORDING to the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States generates roughly 1,560 pounds of municipal solid waste per person per year. Composition studies of municipal solid waste reveal that it consists of between 34 and 59 per cent degradable carbon. Therefore, America’s population of about 269.6 million will have produced in 1997 about 210.3 million short tons of solid waste containing between 71.5 and 124 million tons of degradable carbon.

Other countries have waste-generation rates similar to the United States’. Assuming a world population of 5.8 billion, this implies about 4.5 billion tons of waste containing between 1.5 and 2.7 billion tons of carbon annually. In other words, appropriately constructed landfills could capture roughly 2 billion tons of carbon annually, thus stopping global warming cold.