The environment has long been harmed by the rubbish that humans produce. We cannot sustainably handle the amount of waste that humans produce. Our oceans and landfills are overflowing with waste that cannot decompose and cannot be adequately recycled. Consider the example of plastic trash. Only 9% of the 6.3 billion metric tons of generated plastic waste, according to recent research, had been recycled. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, estimated that the United States generated 267.8 million tons of municipal solid garbage in total just in 2017. It was an increase of 5.7 million when compared to 2015 levels. When taken as a whole, trash production has a negative influence on the environment in a number of ways, including our own public health, wildlife and ecosystems, and the natural environment and climate problem.

Ecosystems and wildlife

Ecosystems differ significantly from one location to another. However, our marine life and rivers are directly impacted by one of the most significant effects of the world's trash crisis. Simply expressed, it has an impact on those whose livelihoods depend on the ocean. They are unable to discriminate between food and non-food items. As a result of the aquatic animal's inability to metabolize the garbage, they die after consuming it. As plastic particles have been discovered in over a thousand species, this impacts fish, seals, turtles, whales, and many other aquatic animals. Starvation is frequently the following stage after ingesting trash or plastics because certain animals do not have enough stomach acid to break down the thing they consumed. Although some animals do, it has been reported that plastic particles can live 100 years. When it comes to biodiversity, our trash issue is seriously harming the well-being of animals around the world.

Climate change

It's disturbing how we handle the waste. What's worse, it appears that waste disposal has gotten sloppier just in this decade. What we haven't done is put the strategies we think will enable us to slow down or adapt to climate change into practice. One example is the discharge of methane gas from garbage that is disposed of in landfills. Further research revealed that open landfills account for 91% of all landfill methane emissions. An alarming amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is warming our planet, is released when enormous, open mounds of trash are burned around the world. According to research, 40% of the world's rubbish is burned in this way, creating significant threats to both our atmosphere and the residents who live close to these burning sites.

Human heath

We are putting human health at risk by doing nothing. We continue to generate a lot of rubbish and improperly dispose of it, which will ultimately be to our detriment as well as that of the environment and the creatures in the ecosystems that we all share. With the way we handle our Earth, we cannot avoid or encourage longevity. Long-term effects result from the increased emissions we make as a result of the amount of rubbish we produce. Asthma, birth deformities, cancer, cardiovascular disease, childhood cancer, COPD, infectious diseases, low birth weight, and preterm delivery are just a few of the illnesses that might strike. The issue that waste creates can also be exacerbated by bacteria, rats, and insects.

Although waste has negative impacts on the environment, waste can also be seen as a resource if managed properly. Let’s look at a scenario where waste can be a resource.

What if we could reduce the demand for the extraction of new resources by using waste as a resource? A number of the effects caused along the chain might be avoided by extracting fewer minerals and utilizing already available resources. Waste that isn't used in this situation is likewise a possible loss. One of the primary goals of the EU's Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe was to convert trash into a resource by 2020. The roadmap also emphasized the need to guarantee high-quality recycling, do away with landfilling, restrict energy recovery to non-recyclable materials, and ban unauthorized garbage shipments. Additionally, these goals were attainable. The largest portion of municipal solid waste is often made up of food and garden waste. When collected individually, this kind of waste can be converted into fertilizer or electricity. Anaerobic digestion is a waste management technique that entails subjecting biowaste to a controlled version of the biological degradation process that occurs in landfills. Biogas and leftover materials from anaerobic digestion can be utilized as fertilizer, like compost.

References

https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/signals-2014/articles/waste-a-problem-or-a-resource

https://www.earthday.org/how-our-trash-impacts-the-environment/