
On June 17th during Global Garbage Man Day, the world takes time to recognize the dedicated efforts of the men and women who keep our communities clean.
We describe the experts who collect the garbage, recyclables, and castoffs from our homes and neighborhoods by several names. Whether they are sanitation specialists or waste management professionals, we appreciate their arrival on a regularly scheduled basis.
- It’s One of the Most Dangerous Jobs in the World. There are around 90 work-related deaths out of 100,000 employees in the US per year. Sanitation worker is ranked third among the riskiest jobs in the United States, with only fishing and timber cutting ranked higher.
- Some Garbage Workers Lift 100 Pounds or More Hundreds of Times During a Shift
- Those assigned to a traditional rear-loading truck lift an average of 13,000 pounds per day. The Bureau of Labor Statistics rates garbage collecting as the fifth-most-dangerous job in America, behind roofers, airplane pilots, fishermen, and loggers.
- The Public Health Act of 1875 created a formal waste collection authority and required that household bins be full with each pick up. Empty cans resulted in a fine.
- it was Benjamin Franklin who created the first street cleaning service in 1757.
- In the early 1900s, most small towns had “piggeries,” small pig farms where raw and cooked food waste was fed to the swine.
- Clean trash can? You’re probably a neat and clean person. We look at restaurants the same way. If their garbage is a disgusting mess, what do you think their kitchen looks like?
- Every route is budgeted a certain number of hours for completion; if we come in over that, our bosses question us to make sure we’re not just angling for overtime. There are also cameras and GPS in some of the trucks so garbage collectors can be monitored at all times.
- On average, an infant will go through 8,000 disposable diapers by the time they are toilet trained.
- Annually, potty-training in the US accounts for the use of 18 billion disposable diapers per year, 49 million per day, and 570 per second.
- Disposable diapers will still be in the landfill 300 years after they were put there.
- Glass takes over 1 million years to fully decompose in a landfill.
- Americans love their plastic bottles. On average, Americans toss 60 million water bottles into the trash every day, which is the equivalent of about 700 trashed bottles each and every minute. Unfortunately, it takes each plastic bottle about 1,000 years to decompose.
- According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the nation’s waste management industry oversees a staggering 250 million tons of trash every year. For perspective, that means each American takes part in producing about four pounds of trash every single day.
- So how much does all of this trash actually weigh? Novelist R.W. Beck set out to learn more about exactly the answer to that question. According to his book, Size of the United States Solid Waste Industry, the weight of all this trash is equivalent to 247 space shuttles or 2.3 million Boeing 747 jumbo jets.
- The average United States resident creates over 4 pounds of trash per day and up to 56 tons of trash per year.
- Americans makeup roughly 5% of the world’s population, but generate nearly 40% of the world’s total waste.
- On a daily basis, the United States produces enough trash to fill 63,000 garbage trucks.
- Today, most communities are spending more on waste management than they are for schoolbooks, fire protection, libraries, and parks.
- Globally, enough hazardous waste is generated each year to fill the New Orleans Superdome more than 1,500 times over.
- New York City residents throw out enough garbage each day to fill the entire Empire State Building.
- Annually the United States discards roughly 1.6 billion pens and 2 billion razor blades.
- Packaging represents about 65% of household trash.
- Only 4% of the world’s children live in the US, but Americans buy (and throw away) 40% of the world’s toys.
- If one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed roughly 870 million people.
- Every year, over 50 million tons of electronic waste (i.e. cell phones, computers, TVs, etc.) is created.
- In the United States alone, over 140 million cell phones are thrown into landfills every year.
- Americans throw out enough plastic cutlery (disposable cups, forks, spoons, and knives) annually to wrap around the equator 300 times, or 7,470,435 miles worth.
- In a lifetime, the average American will leave a legacy of 90,000 pounds of trash for future generations.
- The amount of office paper wasted each year in the state of Massachusetts is enough to fill Fenway Park to the height of the Prudential Building (920 feet high)
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