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I was doing a highway clean-up outside my community for an Earth Day event. It was no surprise that most of what I was collecting was plastic – containers, wrappers and water bottles. Aside from carbon dioxide, plastic waste is a prime nemesis, silently occupying our roadsides, waterways, oceans and bodies.

The overwhelming amount of plastics in our everyday life is a toxic presence that isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s like a swarm of mosquitoes buzzing around our bedrooms at night. You can’t see them, yet you know they will land and extract your blood. Even worse, the plastic residues in our water, food and bodies become microplastics, which don’t biodegrade.

Recent research shows a link between microplastics in our blood and an increased risk of stroke and heart attacks. Are microplastics a core cause of cardiovascular disease? More research is needed, although it’s certainly a plausible theory given the sheer volume of plastics in our environment. So let’s talk trash. Not basketball court shade or even politics, although that’s really tempting (read on). I’m talking about garbage and throwing stuff away.

The narrative of our waste stream is a compelling one. Over the years I’ve been developing my expertise on garbage, which is an ever-evolving story of our broken civilization. While most people my age are taking up pickleball or vacationing in Mexico, I’ve been focusing on keeping garbage out of our environment, starting with the landfill across the street from my community, our piquant neighbor for the past 25 years. Yet as we make and buy more things – there’s more to throw out. We bury our consumerist obsessions every day.

When we are done with most anything, we throw it away, even objects that have a long, useful life. The most interesting object I picked up on the side of the highway, for example, was a golf umbrella. Being a writer, I imagined the story behind it.

“Damn umbrella, you cost me some great shots!” I imagined an irate male golfer once cursed, unable to blame own up to his defective swing and fragile ego. “You’re outta here,” he shouts, as he tosses the umbrella to the side of the road.

Much of my recent knowledge about trash is gleaned from my interest in the “circular” economy. I explored this subject through the work of SWALCO, our county’s solid waste agency, which monitors waste collection and landfill management. (I sit on SWALCO’s executive board and lobby for state laws that will keep certain kinds of garbage out of landfills.).

Recently I was in our state’s capitol (Springfield) lobbying for new laws that would keep kitchen waste and household chemicals out of landfills. To the surprise of many, scraps from our cutting boards account for a whopping 58% of landfill methane emissions, according to the US EPA, although comprising only a quarter of dump garbage by volume.

By diverting food waste into composting – creating soil through natural bacterial action – we can reduce the most harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Food waste-related emissions are estimated to be the equivalent of greenhouse gas emitted by 50 million vehicles annually.

And there’s a triple bonus. In addition to cutting methane production, fertile composted soil can be used in any garden and farm field. As we lose topsoil and nutrients through extreme weather events, composting is an essential climate action strategy. We just need to scale up in every community by building the infrastructure to collect, recycle, distribute or sell composted soil.

Still, my nerdy need to break down garbage disposal by type perplexed me. I wasn’t picking up much food waste on the side of the highway. So I turned once again to US EPA facts that were not yet purged by the Trump Administration or their little muskrat friends. Here are some basics, which I confirmed in my Earth Day clean-up run: All told, Americans generate some 5 pounds of municipal solid (landfill) waste per person per day. This is the rest of the breakdown:

· Construction and demolition debris is the largest component of US waste by weight.

· The single-largest component of the U.S. waste stream by volume is paper and cardboard, accounting for nearly a quarter of all solid waste.

· Yard trimmings and food waste represent 32% of what gets dumped in landfills. Both are compostable.

· Metals and glass account for 13% of the total.

· Plastics account for 12%.

Thanks to widespread municipal recycling programs, paper, cardboard, food waste, metals and some plastics are eminently recyclable. But we need to do a better job recycling materials with low recycling rates – such as carpet, polystyrene plastics, household chemicals, batteries and electronics. When buildings are demolished or homes remodeled, the refuse can also be repurposed.

Public education programs are constantly improving, although “take back” laws for industry to accept hard-to-recycle materials from paints to pharmaceuticals should be a staple of state, local and national legislation. We are consistently ramping up mobile collections for household chemical waste and textiles, a valuable commodity.

I’ve devoted countless hours to supporting take-back laws as a public lobbyist. Yet there’s always fierce pushback from manufacturers on these issues. (especially carpet). We can also slowly change daily habits. If we educated more consumers on the daily virtues of composting, recycling and repurposing, that may speed our transition to a circular economy. Better yet, why not tax products that contain single-use plastics or require manufacturers to take them back to either re-purpose or recycle them in an environmentally responsible way? In progressive circles, product takeback laws are called “Extended Producer Responsibility.” You make it, you have to take it back!

Still, I can imagine some future archaeologists sifting through ancient suburban ruins hoping to gain insights into our society. Instead of pottery shards, they will find single-use beverage bottles, snack packages and vape cartridges. I can only hope that they will also find the remnants of numerous gardens fertilized with composted kitchen waste. At that discovery, they may even think we were an advanced civilization.

At this point, though, reforming the way we handle waste is taking a back seat to how we treat people as Republicans gut Medicaid, environmental and judicial protections. They have to stop treating most people in this country as disposable items.

Vincit Omnia Veritas

(Truth Conquers All)

This essay was not produced by AI. I am a sentient writer, journalist, author, environmentalist, speaker, musician and elected county forest preserve commissioner who’s written 19 books and contributed to The New York Times, Next Avenue, Bloomberg and Reuters.

Thanks for reading and please share! To contact me about speaking and writing or just to comment or offer even more dangerous ideas, email me: johnwasik@gmail.com.

As a bonus, subscribers receive free access to my new book “The Natural Neighborhood,” which is serialized in this newsletter: A new chapter every month.