Garbage : Trash Talk - America's Environmental Report Card - page 85

particularly supermarket food products, is a national disgrace and could
easily be reduced without harming the quality of the food.
Only 12 percent of the daily garbage is food scraps because half of
American homes have garbage disposal units under the kitchen sink. 2
Electronic Equipment
An increasing amount of discards from American homes is computers.
The technology of computers advances rapidly, leading to rapid obso-
lescence of existing models. There are hundreds of millions of obsolete
computers in the United States. Seventy percent of them will end up in
landfi lls. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says computers
are the nation's fastest-growing category of solid waste.
It has been estimated that about 75 percent of obsolete electronic
equipment is being stored, but about 13,000 computers are disposed of
every day in the United States. 3 Circuit boards, batteries, and color
cathode ray tubes contain lead, mercury, chromium, and other hazard-
ous material. If the computers are simply dumped, these toxins can be
released into the soil and water through landfi lls or in the form of toxic
incinerated ash. Trashing old computer equipment is not an environmen-
tally friendly disposal method. Fortunately, many voluntary and non-
profi t organizations are dedicated to computer recycling. Reusable
materials include steel, glass, plastic, and precious metals. Those expen-
sive ink cartridges, fl oppy disks, CDs, speakers, keyboards, and cords
also contain materials that can easily be reused.
Babies' Bottoms
Disposable diapers fi rst appeared in 1949 and, like computer hardware,
are a growing source of household discards. They now are the third
largest consumer item in landfi lls, behind newspapers and bottles. In
families with several young children, disposable diapers can fi ll the
garbage pail for years because babies may need to have their diapers
changed ten or more times a day. The average baby uses about 7,000
diapers from birth to potty training, producing about 4,000 pounds of
waste to a landfi ll if he or she wears disposable diapers. The Bay Area
of San Francisco, with 7.2 million residents, generates 600 million
disposable diapers a year—83 diapers per resident. 4 They weigh 180
million pounds; for the entire United States, the number is 8 billion
pounds.
Twenty billion diapers are sold each year in the United States. If a
parent uses only reusable cotton diapers, about sixty of them will suffi ce