I don’t know about you, but I feel just about buried in packaging. And I’d like to do something about it. But for many products there is no choice.

Carroll County Recycling

The county in Arkansas where we live (Carroll County) really does a fine job with drop-off for cardboard, motor oil, magazines and paper. That’s in addition to the bottles and plastic they pick up in tubs every week.

But is so much packaging necessary?

According to a 2019 article in Earth Island Journal, each American annually produces 1,700 pounds of garbage, which includes packaging. How can we curtail this, recycle more and save precious landfill space?

Our chickens helped

Before we moved to Arkansas we kept backyard chickens who ate most of our table scraps and gave us beautiful eggs in return. We haven’t yet built a chicken coop here, though. I have been tossing some scraps out toward where I hope we’ll build a compost center for next summer’s small garden plot.

Something to brag about!

America loves to collect superlatives. But here’s one to be not so proud of: The United States is the world’s most wasteful country. And the runner-up isn’t even close.

According to Verisk Maplecroft, a global risk-assessment and consulting firm, the United States accounts for only about 4 percent of the world’s population. But we generate 12 percent of the planet’s municipal solid waste or trash. Each American produces more than 1,700 pounds of it a year, the report’s authors found. That adds up to 239 million tons annually.

What about China and India?

Do China and India generate more trash? Yes, together they’re on the hook for 27 percent of the world’s garbage. But those two countries also have a combined population of 2.7 billion, to our relatively paltry 327 million. The math is mortifying. With more than eight times as many people as we have, China and India manage to produce just a little more than twice the amount of garbage that we do. American citizens generate more than three times the amount of waste that their Chinese counterparts do.

Global problem

Granted, this is a global problem. Verisk Maplecroft’s analysts calculate that people produce more than 2.1 billion tons of trash annually, “enough to fill 822,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.” But of the 194 countries whose waste streams it studied, the United States stood out in several worrisome ways.

Lack of commitment

Among them is what the authors call America’s “lack of commitment to offsetting its waste footprint.” They looked at how much and what kind of waste each country generated. They also noted what steps individual nations were taking to manage their waste streams. That would include things like rates of recycling, modes of collection and disposal, promotion rates of recycling, modes of collection and disposal, and commitment to international treaties. In this respect, they write, “the US falls well behind other industrialized nations.” They compare our recycling rate of 35 percent with Germany’s rate of 68 percent. They then go on to assert that we are “the only developed nation whose waste generation outstrips its ability to recycle, underscoring a shortage of political will and investment in infrastructure.”

Zero waste

I read a piece recently about someone whose goal was to have zero waste, and she was succeeding impressively by careful planning. But now zero waste has become something else altogether, a goal that cities and countries are setting for themselves and taking concrete steps to achieve. San Francisco, San Diego, and New York are aiming to break the trash-to-landfill cycle completely, and permanently, by 2040 or sooner. Like other cities  moving toward a zero-waste future, they’ve had to modify a few plans and push back a few deadlines along the way. But they haven’t given up. Instead, these cities have approached each setback as a problem to be solved, not as an insurmountable barrier.

Styrofoam, plastic bags

As more and more of our cities, towns, and communities ban Styrofoam and plastic bags, Americans are realizing that it’s really fine to live without these environmentally harmful items. And our growing disenchantment with plastic is occurring simultaneously with an entrepreneurial wave of new businesses that spurn conventional packaging or even any kind of packaging. While reducing their own waste streams, they’re also showing consumers and competing businesses a new way forward, growing the market for zero-waste lifestyles and spawning plenty of imitators.

We need an attitude change

These are positive trends, but not one of them by themselves has the power to lift us from our low and shameful ranking. That will take a radical transformation of our priorities that results in a circular economy where reuse is built into every business model, city plan, and household budget. Will we decide not to buy something because it has too much packaging? That would catch producers’ attention. We have a ways to go, folks.