". We discard empty cardboard boxes, tin cans, and bottles, for example. To most people throughout the world, these are very precious utilitarian objects. Even industrialized nations by and large cannot afford to scrap such things: it is a waste of money and, worse, it is a waste of our natural resources, because...
... every object is made from things we find in nature. Paper is made from trees. Glass is made from sand. Plastic is made from petroleum (oil). Metal is made from minerals found in the earth. As a result, the more paper we use, the more trees we cut. Trees give off oxygen without which we cannot breathe. We are now cutting trees so fast that the quality of the air we breathe is at risk. As to petroleum, who knows how much there is left in the earth? Enough for the next generation? Maybe not.
Each American produces 4 pounds of waste a day. Multiply this by the 250 millions of us, and we face the staggering garbage heap of one more billion pounds every day! It has now become urgent for all of us to reduce our waste drastically and to devise ways of disposing of what is left.
So, what do we actually do with all this waste today? We cart it away to landfills. We dump it into our rivers and oceans. We burn it. Each of these methods has a very life-threatening aspect to it. With regards to landfills, "we are running out of room for our garbage. Landfills all over the world are literally spilling over; in the United States alone, one quarter of the country's municipalities are expected to exhaust their landfill capacity before 1985" (Stilwell et al. 1). If landfill capacity shortage is a problem, a worse one is our exposure to toxins which leach into water supplies to our fields and homes. What are we to do, then? Dump trash into rivers and oceans? "And the oceans, once treated cavalierly as an infinite waste depository, have begun to wash back our own refuse to our shores" (Stilwell et al. 1). ...