Informative Text on Garbage

Informative Text on Garbage

Garbage, a global problem

Trash, waste or residues are the names that we ordinarily give to all the waste materials that our daily activities generate. From our bathrooms and kitchens, to medical centers, supermarkets and industries of all kinds, the massive production of garbage is a symptom of our times, in which plastics and other non-biodegradable and useless materials predominate, as well as of our model of life and consumption of goods and services.

It is estimated that a human being produces on average about one kilogram of garbage per day, which might not seem like much, but in a world of more than 7 billion human beings, it constitutes billions of tons of waste per year. Of this immense amount of garbage, only a fraction (around 16%) is reused and recycled, leaving a gigantic mass of waste with no place that, therefore, ends up in the environment.

What is garbage?

The word “trash” It comes from the Latin versa, translatable as “that which must be swept away”. That is why when we talk about garbage, we refer to everything that is useless and therefore deserves to be thrown away or discarded, without distinguishing between the type of objects or substances that compose it. Normally, garbage contains elements of different origin and nature, which we can classify based on two different criteria:

• • household waste. Generated in people’s homes, either by direct consumption (such as food scraps) or because they are produced by appliances or household appliances (such as batteries, spare parts or damaged elements).
  • commercial waste. Generated in stores, markets and other exchange sites for goods and services, such as waste paper from offices, leftover food and drink from bars, etc.
  • Industrial waste. Generated by basic, manufacturing or power generation industries. They are generally the most dangerous and difficult to handle waste, such as chemical elements, containers, construction remains or defective manufactured products.
  • Sanitary or medical waste. They are generated by hospitals, clinics and health centers, so their reuse must be done according to strict ethical and health protocols, or it is simply impossible. These residues often represent a risk to public health and require careful treatment, such as used syringes, used latex gloves, etc.
  • space debris. Generated by trips into space or to the upper layers of the atmosphere. These debris, such as spacecraft or satellite fragments, remain in orbit at high speeds and can be a hazard for future missions.

• • organic waste. That have a biological origin and therefore are likely to biodegrade, such as food scraps, leaves and branches of trees, hair cut at hairdressers, etc.
  • inorganic waste. That they do not have a biological origin but an artificial one, and that they do not biodegrade or do so very slowly. They are generally the result of industrial or chemical processes, such as plastics, synthetic fabrics, etc.
  • mixed waste. They combine organic and inorganic and therefore are prone to different, often unpredictable chemical reactions, such as batteries, leftover solvents and other substances.

What is done with the garbage in the world?

The great drawback of generating so much garbage worldwide is that there is no space to throw it away and forget about it. The vast majority of this waste is piled up in landfills, very unsanitary places with limited capacity, where they are left to decompose freely or are even buried to prevent them from coming into contact with people.

But these spaces are limited, especially in industrialized countries that do not have large tracts of idle territory. In many of these cases, countries pay other countries to receive their garbage. In fact, China was for many decades a recipient of Western garbage, until in 2018 it decided to prohibit the entry of foreign garbage into its territory and left that role to Malaysia, since then considered the “world dump”.

For the rest, the garbage ends up in the environment: rivers, lakes and seas are currently flooded with it. There is an island of garbage in the Pacific Ocean, concentrated by ocean currents in its northern zone, whose surface is estimated to be between 710,000 and 17,000,000 square kilometers. In this huge garbage patch, plastics of all kinds and sizes are concentrated, many of which have been eroded to the size of a grain of rice. This makes them difficult to clean and an immense impact on marine fauna.

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