Talking Trash is a great article from Foreign Policy magazine covering trash statistics.  According to the article the world throws away roughly 2 billion tons of garbage every year and the average high income country resident generates 3.1 pounds of garbage per day.  That's a lot of trash.

The good news is recycling rates are at historic highs.  Interestingly enough low income countries tend to do a pretty good job of recycling because they have so many low income people collecting and recycling trash to eke out a living - 500,000 in Brazil alone.  But as the chart below from the article shows (FP has great charts), there is still lots of room for improvement in the US.

The other good news is trash can be turned into ethanol.  Bizarre Biofuels, another FP article, discusses that state of garbage to ethanol conversion and points out that during the last year several trash-to-ethanol plants have been approved in the US and Canada.

There are many examples of successful small recycling businesses in the US.  Over the coming months we will be profiling some of the participants in this growing sector of the economy. 

Link to original post