So you threw out your trash and recy- cled your bottle…then what? Here are some facts to give some context into what happens after you take the trash to the dumpster—where is all the waste is go- ing and what’s being done to re-use and resource it?
Alex Scrivner | Contributing Writer
Trash
Waste and recycling jobs can be extremely dangerous. In 2008, studies showed that on a national scale there was a higher fatality rate amongst waste and recycling haulers than police officers and firefighters.
Los Angeles generates 23 million tons of waste and recycling every year and around 10 million tons of that waste goes straight into landfills.
Businesses and large apartment com- plexes output 70 percent of the total waste that the city of LA sends to land- fills.
Trash haulers are oftentimes unable to redistribute profitable recyclables due to contamination and trash produced juice called leachate. Hazardous leachate is produced at any point a liquid inter- acts with a contaminated or hazardous material in the trash that is all eventually sorted by human beings alongside machinery.
Recycling
The capital produced from waste could thrive if it focused more on a recycling economy. Recycling could create 5,000 jobs in LA County alone and for every one waste worker job, five composting and 20 recycling jobs could be created.
The “Recycling Economy” generates $37 billion in annual wages and $236 billion in annual revenue, employing more than a million people and account- ing for 2 percent of the U.S. GDP.
A majority of waste could be diverted and re-used if all recyclables including paper, organics, plastic, construction debris, metals, wood, electronics, textiles and glass were properly separated.
The county of San Francisco diverts 80 percent of its waste, the county of LA 60 percent, according to 2012 records.
In 2011, the U.S. collected 52.8 million tons of recycling and exported a record of more than 23 million tons, according to an Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries report from 2012. About 15.8 million tons of that went to China, which the report said was 23 percent more than in 2010.