#peak garbage

Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian, October 30, 2013

In 2013, if you're someone who cares about the environment, your first and foremost concern is probably climate change. After that, you might worry about things like radioactive contamination, collapsing honeybee colonies and endangered ecosystems, among other contemporary environmental perils that fill recent news headlines.

But a number of researchers in the field are focused on a problem that has faded out of the news cycle: the piles of garbage that are growing around the world.

A recent World Bank report projected that the amount of solid waste generated globally will nearly double by the year 2025, going from 3.5 million tons to 6 million tons per day. But the truly concerning part is that these figures will only keep growing for the foreseeable future. We likely won't hit peak garbage--the moment when our global trash production hits its highest rate, then levels off--until sometime after the year 2100, the projection indicates, when we produce 11 million tons of trash per day.