The United States is No. 1 — when it comes to garbage output, new report finds
The United States is the trashiest country in the world — in one sense, at least.
Despite making up only 4 percent of the global population, the U.S. creates 12 percent of the world’s municipal waste, according to a new waste generation and recycling report released on Tuesday by Verisk Maplecroft, a Britain-based research and risk analysis company.
That’s about the same amount of garbage generated by India, a country of 1.35 billion. But the U.S. population was just 327 million last year, according to the World Bank.
The U.S. produces more waste and recycles less than any other nation, the report found, with a per capita garbage output seven times higher than Ethiopia and more than triple China.
Since the U.S. has the world’s largest economy, its waste output may not be that surprising — “but what is significant is its lack of commitment to offsetting its waste footprint,” the report said.
The U.S. recycles only 35 percent of its municipal waste, compared with hyper-efficient Germany, which recycles 68 percent, the report said. The United Kingdom recycles 44 percent of its waste, according to the report.
“The US is the only developed nation whose waste generation outstrips its ability to recycle, underscoring a shortage of political will and investment in infrastructure,” the report authors wrote. “The country’s seeming lack of resolve to deal with waste domestically may become a mounting problem in the face of plastics import bans from China and many developing countries, where the US currently exports a large proportion of its plastic waste.”
Recycling alone can’t solve the waste problem, Verisk Maplecroft report authors said.
“There’s too much focus on recycling being the kind of silver bullet solution, which it is not,” said Niall Smith, senior environmental analyst at the company, per The Guardian. “We have enough plastic in circulation to really cause disruption of marine food webs, which is already in process. I think what we need to be working towards is almost a zero-material-footprint kind of society.”
Asian countries are considering or implementing policies to reject plastic waste that the U.S., Canada and other Western countries long sent to places like China, Vietnam and Thailand to be recycled, the Los Angeles Times reported last week.
“Countries in this region are bucking this whole idea that they should be dumping grounds for the world’s waste,” said Lea Guerrero, a campaigner with Greenpeace in the Philippines, according to the newspaper.
After China decided last year to stop taking recyclables that are often mixed with garbage, cities across the U.S. began canceling recycling programs or burning items that were meant to be recycled, The New York Times reported in March.
“I think you see in survey after survey that infrastructure in the US just isn’t there to provide the recycling option,” said Will Nichols, Verisk Maplecroft’s head of environmental research, according to the BBC. “A lot of US waste — now that it can’t get shipped to China — is just getting burnt, there just isn’t the investment in place in infrastructure to deal with this problem.”
This story was originally published July 3, 2019 at 4:09 PM with the headline "The United States is No. 1 — when it comes to garbage output, new report finds."
