The latest issue of Discover magazine has a great one page article entitled “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Garbage”.  Here are the highlights:

1. The oldest trash site discovered was in South Africa and it was 140,000 years old.

3. Americans generate 472 billion pounds of trash a year.

4. That only represents 2% of the total trash stream, industrial refuse takes up the rest.

11. Landfills are the #1 man-made source of methane belching 7 million tons into the atmosphere each year.

17. American receive around 100 billion pieces of junk mail a year.

19. Marine researcher Charles Moore found 10 pounds of floating plastic in the North Pacific for every pound of living plankton.

The old term waste not want not kind of takes on a whole new meaning.