Garbage and excessive spending

Published on February 16th, 2024

The United States produces 265 million tons of garbage each year. Since there are 300+ million [United States of] Americans, this means that each person on average produces slightly less than a ton of garbage each year. Although it is conveniently moved out of sight and thus out of mind every week, that ton of garbage has to go somewhere.

About 12% of the garbage is incinerated; 33% is recycled and 55% ends up in landfills. Landfills pretty much work like tombs which means that unlike compost which turns into fertilizer, the matter in landfills does not decay into anything. It just takes up space.

Looking at the average budget, I think we can surmise that consumers like to replace their things very often and that they prefer replacing them with new things. This sad behavior creates more garbage than replacing them with old things or not replacing them at all due to trickle down economics. This incredible wasteful lifestyle explains why the average “consumer unit” (2 parents and 0.5 children) spends $49000 a year and vice a versa. It also means that pretty much everything you see in a department store will end up in a landfill 5-10 years from now. A quick survey of your home should indicate whether you contribute to that depressing fact. How many of your clothes, appliances, furniture, vehicles, … are more than 10 years old? More accurately, how many are not?

It is interesting to note that much archeology and understanding of ancient history is based on the contents of ancient garbage dumps. Pottery in particular, because ceramics is so remarkably stable and thus survives much longer than the other garbage; thousands of years. Now, our civilization does not have much of a tradition in terms of pottery, but yet we do fill our landfills with numerous very solid ceramic objects that will likely survive even longer than the pots and plates of the ancients. When future archeologists dig through our dumps, they will find them dominated by our … toilet bowls. How’s that for a legacy?

In other news: Have a look at the Yakezie Challenge Carnival courtesy of deliverawaydebt.com to see if there are some interesting blogs you don’t know yet.

Originally posted 2010-02-26 20:06:12.

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Simple in France said,

Too true. I’m actually not sure what’s worse–a home cluttered with all that garbage because people won’t get rid of the old when they buy something ‘new’ or a sleek looking home and landfills full of crap.

I’m simply haunted by a show I saw on the News Hour maybe two years ago about the ‘trash outs’ that are happening in Southern California (specifically the Inland Empire). When people lose their McMansion to foreclosure, they just walk away leaving all their accumulated possessions inside. They have special teams of people that go into the homes and haul everything to the dump–a lot of it is perfectly good stuff, but there is not time to deal with it–it just goes straight to the dump. What a world . . .

A final thought–behind every average is quite a wide range of behavior. A lot of people in the US actually don’t have the money to spend so much on frivolous crap. And a number of people who have the money don’t. So there is a particular segment of the population (admittedly perhaps a large-ish one) that is buying new and trashing out on a large scale. Kind of like when you review ‘average’ credit card debt.

Jacob said,

@SIF – Indeed, the statistical quantity of average is not very useful when dealing with population behavior. The mean (amount that divided the population into two groups) or the mode (the amount with the largest representation) would be more useful.

Another problem is that we sometimes simply don’t see ourselves as average. For instance, the family which spends $50000 each year and yet considers itself frugal.

One the guys behind the ecological footprint theory/work actually spent a year holding all his nondecaying garbage in his home e.g. all packaging, broken stuff, etc. It turned out to be quite a bit. Of course some will argue that the total acreage of the landfills is quite small, but that’s a bit like saying that the entire world’s population could fit into Texas. In fact one problem with garbage is that it is not that contained.

An interesting thing I found while getting data for this post is that people even throw out their nickels and pennies. Some garbage plants pull in as much as $2000 per week in discarded money.

RetirementInvestingToday said,

Great post. One example from my side. With my frugal lifestyle I still have a television which is only 15″ in size. Why haven’t I bought a bigger one? Well it works and does what it should.

All my friends and colleagues every couple of years seem to have newer bigger TV’s. First it was plasma, then LCD’s and now bigger/better LED based TV’s. They think I’m crazy.

Where are all the old TV’s going. I guess the majority to landfill.

Linada said,

Apparently future geologists will find a lot of plastic in our sedimentary rock. Our trash is starting to define a new geological age.

Random Thoughts of a Jersey Mom said,

Clothes more than 10 years? No. I actually weigh less than 10 yrs ago so those clothes have been donated. My kids grow like weeds ~ so all of their old clothes go to donation as well.

Appliances more than 10 years? No. When we moved into this 50 yr old house, we had to replace all of the appliances. The previous retired couple told us up front that their appliances were “on their last leg”.

Furniture? Most have been with us since we got married. We did have to get a new sofa last year because our newly adopted dog ate our last sofa.

Cars? One is actually 10 yrs old. The other is 5 yrs old. We’re planning on keeping them until they break down.

Random Thoughts of a Jersey Mom said,

“For instance, the family which spends $50000 each year and yet considers itself frugal.”

My family have expenses more than $50k each year. I do consider us to be relatively frugal. To me, frugal does not mean not spending money. In my opinion, being frugal is using money wisely.

KnobbyKabushka said,

Drill a big hole about 100 feet round to the center of earth and dup all of it in there to burn with the molten lava…

KnobbyKabushka said,

Of course when California splits and falls into the ocean after the 11.0 earthquake in 2012 we should hav a big gap to fill in too…

OurTakeOnFreedom said,

@Jacob & SIF – I agree that the average isn’t the best way to look at these figures. I’m curious how those 265 million tons are divided between consumer and commercial garbage. I would guess that a good portion of it is commercial, but perhaps you have the answer, Jacob?

LeanLifeCoach said,

I’ve never claimed to be an environmentalist but I have always appreciated quality, longevity and sustainability. Never have I understood why people replace things when they break, have minor flaws or get a little old.

We routinely repair (often DIY) before we replace. We still have a TV we bought over a decade ago and that was only replaced because its 17 year old predecessor died in a blaze of glory.

Our 12 year old car looks like crap to others but looks beautiful to us. Every time we look at it we see no payments!

Mo said,

@Jacob, are you trying to indicate median instead of mean? Isn’t mean the arithmetic average?

Your comment about folks throwing away money is interesting to me– what interests me is how the garbage sorters find the money. Some European countries have magnetic coins so they can easily be detected in certain processes– such as canning foods to make sure disgruntled employees don’t slip in coins or other metal items to harm the consumer. US coins are substantially less magnetic, so I wonder how they’re found.

Jacob said,

@Mo – Yes, I meant median.

Jacob said,

@OTOF – 1/3 is commercial. 2/3’s are consumer. Kinda like about 2/3 of the economy is consumer driven. Spending => Trash seems to bear out.

Kevin M said,

Wow, almost 1 ton per person per year is sick.

Not surprising when you drive down my street and see large, rolling 65 gallon trash cans loaded full every week. What especially pisses me off is that I routinely see cardboard and other recyclables sticking out. I’m not sure what my neighbors are doing, considering we have about one trash bag per week plus our recycling container which is usually overflowing.

I’d love to approach some neighbors and say something, but how to approach it?

krisis said,

I always view our garbage as an indicator of how successful we are at spending responsibly (in both a budgetary and ecological sense). While we have bags upon bags of recycling, we barely fill a single garbage bag in two weeks! Honestly, I’d like to get it down to one bag a month.

The point of 10-year-old items in our homes is a salient one. Most of my friends scoff when I tell them I still wear jeans from high school, or that I’m using my childhood bureau. They delight in their acquisitions.

Looking around my home, many core elements of my life were paid for over a decade ago, but it doesn’t look as if I’m a packrat. Why discard something that’s still functional?

Maybe that is why your blog make so much sense to me – I’ve always understood and lived by this aesthetic.

Kris said,

My husband and I like old things. And we find it hard to get rid of old things as well . . .

The last vehicle that we got rid of was a VW Vanagon that was 22 years old. And rather than haul it to a junk yard and receive $75 for it, we gave it to a collector instead.

(Because only the hand brake, not the regular brakes, worked, we drove it to the collector’s house when traffic was light, in the wee hours of the morning. But then on the way there, the hand break also broke.)

Currently our newest car is 11 years old and our oldest car is 17 years old.

When it comes to clothes, we tend to wear things out. If our worn-out clothes can’t be used for rags, we take them to the local recycling center.

(I admit, though, that I probably won’t wear out everything in my closet. I’m thinking about one decades-old suit jacket with gigantic shoulder pads out to there . . .)

As far as furniture goes, everything we own is more than 10 years old. Our sofa is 30 years old and, unfortunately, looks it. Two of our pieces of furniture, a chest and a linen press, are more than 200 years old. (Thankfully, wooden furniture holds up longer than upholstered furniture does.)

Our house isn’t quite as old as our oldest furniture. It was built 103 years ago.

HSpencer said,

@Kris

I own a 1955 Chest Type Coca Cola machine. It was made by Ideal Mfg, in Indiana. To hear it run, you must put your ear to the compressor housing. To my knowledge, it has never been serviced or Freon added. I have ordered a few parts (rubber gaskets and seals) and installed them. I also repainted it in original colors, Coca Cola red and white. It sold the short classic Coca Cola bottle, and it is coined at ten cents. The quality of this is outstanding in every way.
I also own a 1962 Sears Craftsman table saw. The motor is strong and quiet, and with a new carbide blade it will cut nearly any thickness of wood. I inherited this from my dad, when he passed away. Again the quality of the tool is above/beyond what you get today.
I have many other “old” items I use daily. Some have no parts available anymore. These, to me, are treasures. I am very upset with today’s junk, and understand why the landfills are full in that respect.

m- said,

I work for a large upstart garbage collector. I rode on the back of garbage trucks for almost 8 months. I find it amazing what people will throw away. All of our house hold goods have either come from the street curb on trash day (brand new dressers, nice living room set) My husband and I were looking to get a bigger refrigerator when we moved in to our 1960’s house. My coworker got new stainless steel, and we upgraded to their old one. I feel like the luckiest person in the world with my house full of junk….

Kris said,

@HSpencer

I would love to see your Coke machine!

Not as impressive as your machine, but noteworthy none the less, was my parents’ first refrigerator, a Kelvinator that was given to them as a wedding gift shortly after World War II. They used it for well over 50 years, first in the kitchen, then in the basement. Similar to your Coke machine, the only “repair” it received in all that time was to replace the rubber door gasket.

Also, our basement tool room is filled with tools from my grandfather, who died 50 years ago.

kin said,

Ironic enough, the newest claims of solutions to the “economic problems” in the entire world is for everybody to consume more(new things). Well, that means the ones still with money in reserves and specifically, they are pointing fingers at people in China, Japan, and Germany.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/27/AR2010022701421.html?hpid=sec-business

fern said,

Nice post!

Not enough is written, IMO about the connection between doing what’s right for our pocketbooks and doing what’s right for the planet.

Usually, when you do one, the other will follow.

kate in NY said,

In my 100 year old house, I have a 65 year old stove, which still works. The oven temp. is higher than it reads, but the 65 year old manual says that happens over time, and it should be re-calibrated. I save things.

I have an 18 year old fridge, and I almost replaced it because there are some state rebates this year, but it makes more sense to wait until it dies (because I am away a lot, and unplug the fridge for half of the year).

Someone commented earlier about old tvs and electronics in landfills. Mine are in my attic and garage. There have been a lot of problems with landfills. In my city, methane gas in an old landfill exploded, destroying houses nearby. It’s easier just to store the old electronic stuff until I find a solution.

tracysimplylivinginspain said,

My mom had an iron she received as a wedding gift in 1963 — it lasted at least 40 years. I think I have gone through at least five irons in the last ten years (even the expensive European ones with the separate water tank and all). It’s definitely engineered obsolescence…

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FrugalZen said,

Other than clothes bought for work all my clothes are nearly 20 years old. Higher end all cotton…Ya getz wut ya payz for.

While the motorcycle is newer ’08…the pickup is a ’81…and I may get a classic tag this year…discount on the cost…so the average age is 18 years on the vehicles.

TV is newer maybe 5 years or so after last Sony Trinitron knockoff from Radio Shack pooped after almost 25 years.

Rice Cooker is 30 years old and still works perfect as does 20 year old Hoover Upright Vacuum.

What people throw out/you can buy for a pittance is amazing.

Three months ago at the mailbox for the street neighbor had set out a large box of dishes for the garbage man to pick up.

About 4 different sets most of them with only a cup or plate missing…scarfed all the cups and took to work so we’d have reusable coffee cups…at least until they got broken or lost…beats styrofoam and the money they cost.

We furnished our office with cast offs from the Disney surplus disoposal sales….one of the goodies was a Legal Size Fireproof 5 Drawer Filing Cabinet made by Diebold…with Keys. Bottom drawer roller slide on one side needed replacing…paid $20 for it and another $20 for a new slide…granted it took one of our bigger trucks to tote it home and a LOT of work to get it into the office and it hasn’t budged in 25 years now…darn thing weighs 800 lbs empty. Thing was more than $3000 when new.

Dining tables in the employees breakroom I think we paid $100 for from one of our customers…traded in on new ones they decided they didn’t like orange.

Until the Health Department stopped them doing it (quote: “its unsafe to eat because it takes too long for it to go from fryer hot to completely cold even when immediately put into a 35 degree cooler”…gimme a break!!!) I used to stop and get day old chicken from the Maryland Fried Chicken store….10 cents for a whole wing and 50 cents for a solid white meat center breast…great chicken salad fixins.

Caught one guy next door at the truck stop getting fuel…pickup truck bed full of carrots…all culls from the packing house…misshapen, broken, too long, too short…all going for pig feed…got a giant shopping bag of them for $1…darn good ones too..fresh from the fields and never refridgerated. (carroted out though for a while after…LOL)

nickel said,

They’re going to have to dig through tons and tons and tons of plastic to find our toilet bowls.

Geek said,

It’s amazing what people will throw out because the trash is *right there*.

It’s amazing that we’re willing to go to work 40-80 hours/week and we’re not willing to spend an hour keeping our stuff out of the dump.

I’ve taken to ebay->freecycle->goodwill for my consumer goods…I’ve got a couple hundred off of ebay. With freecycle I’ve gotten rid of (backpacks, cat box, gmat study guide, more backpacks, coffeemaker, 15 year old skis) much more than I’ve acquired (adorable dessert bowls). And for goodwill, I’ve figured out that I am one of very few people who don’t give away broken things just to ease my trash guilt.

I’m very lucky that we have giant recycling dumpsters as well as garbage dumpsters at our apartment complex. Right outside is easy.
Has anyone had success getting their apt complex to do composting?

As for my stuff…
Sofa ~5 years (previous were ~15)
Kitchen table ~20+ years (new arriving soon hoping it will last 50+ years)
Bedroom dressers 50+ years
Beds 5+ years.
Computers are rarely more than 3 years old, but software is my industry. TV is about 5 years old…
Clothing is newer – perhaps I’m hard on my clothes, or I like things that tend to wear out, but tshirts don’t last more than 3-4 years anymore for me.

teewonk said,

This family of four has reduced their trash to an extremely low level:
http://zerowastehome.blogspot.com/

Most people would consider them extreme, but then again, a ton of trash every year is pretty extreme in the other direction.

FreeUrChains said,

My toilet bowl will be made of Gold, In honor of China’s Growth and Greatness in the far future. They manufacture everything we use in our generation and we borrow from their unearthed resources, plus they invest in Gold while other countries sell gold to try to stabilize their debts. The future will think i was God, if I have a Gold Toilet 🙂

FreeUrChains said,

I agree with KnobbyKabushka. When a volcano erupts, the local landfill becomes one with the earth’s crust.It’s more vital to be concerned for our Atmosphere and Oxygen/Magnetoshpere protection then it is having to build our shelters out of Garbage and on Garbage.

You can only survive 0.4 sec without Air Pressure, 4 seconds without a Magnetoshpere, 4 min without Oxygen, 40 min without Heat, 4 days without Water, and 40 days without Food.

Jacob said,

@nickel – Plastic decays within a couple of hundred years.

BeyondtheWrap said,

“Landfills pretty much work like tombs which means that unlike compost which turns into fertilizer, the matter in landfills does not decay into anything. It just takes up space.”

Stuff doesn’t decay in tombs?

Dale said,

Jacob,

Does plastic really decay (changes chemical composition), or does it just break down into smaller units while maintaining the same chemical structure?

Anyway, it is possible to generate practically no waste. The key is being diligent in regards to what we bring into the home, and fixing things versus simply disposing of them. A good book on this subject is The Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson. Check it out if you are not familiar with it. She also has a blog by the same name. I’m not to her level, but I’m pretty close.

Tor-ulf said,

If those numbers are correct, the potential for improvement in the handeling of the waste is pretty big.

Where I live (Sweden) the numbers look like this:
Garbage from households: 0.46 tons /year /person
32% material recycling
15% compost and digestion
52% waste burning (creates elevtricity and district heating)
1% landfill

Nick | Millionaires Giving Money said,

I try to recycle as much as possible. I probably recycle 80% of items in my household. Most of the time the bins are empty. All clothes go to consignment stores, all cardboard is thrown in the recycling bin in the community center and all. Great post, thanks for sharing.

Zoebios said,

Someone’s been reading the Humanure Handbook. It definitely opened my eyes, good read.

Free to Pursue said,

Our yearly garbage is a joke because we buy very little, food waste ends up in our compost bin (and meat leftovers in our dog’s bowl) and all paper products we receive end up as kindling in our fireplace (which unfortunately is a lot because basic cardboard & paper packaging is out of control). It feels great to see that our weekly garbage bag is often half the size of our recycling.

We can do so much to reduce, reuse and recycle, but for some reason, “reduce” does not seem to be enough of a priority in our culture.

Free to Pursue said,

@FrugalZen – Wow! Tip of the hat to you. That’s what I’m talking about. You are setting the bar for us all!

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