4-H Trash to Treasure Winners Recognized at Cannon County Good Ole Days
May 20, 2021
By: Sarah Ferrell, 4-H Youth Development Agent III
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Americans produce more than four pounds of trash per person per day, amounting to 20 percent of the world’s waste. Although recycling rates have increased over the past thirty years, out of the four pounds of trash produced in the U.S. each day, 1.5 pounds is either composted or recycled while another 0.5 pounds is incinerated. However, more than 50 percent of waste still ends up buried in landfills. This is an issue because landfills are becoming overran with waste. Although recycling is encouraged, we need to do a better job at educating the public on how to recycle and the proper items to recycle. Households have switched to single-stream recycling where all recyclable materials are mixed in a single bin at home which made it easier to recycle waste. Unfortunately, this makes it easier for paper or plastics to become contaminated by other materials like food and liquids in the recycling stream; therefore, between 5 and 25 percent of a materials recovery facility’s incoming recyclables are discarded and sent to landfills. These are items that are discarded in the landfill just because the general public that took the initiative to first do the good deed and recycle, was unaware of the proper method and did not realize items should be divided further. Like other counties across the state, Cannon County does a good job in picking trash up off the sides of the road but tax payers do not realize the money they could save if they would be responsible enough not to litter to begin with. In Cannon County our goal is to educate the public.