Every Country in the World Ranked by How Much Trash They Produce per Person and How Much of That Is Recycled

Posted by countdookee

8 comments

  1. I was in the US during 2018. The amount of plastic bags they use at Walmart check out was appalling.

    I’ve also read somewhere that the fresh fruit and vegetables in American Walmarts can only be displayed for less than couple of hours. Therefore the garbage bin outside of them are filled with tons fresh food everyday.

  4. It’s interesting but the final destination for that trash is the most important factor here.

    1kg/person that ends up in the ocean is worse than 100 kg/person that gets put in a sustainable landfill or incinerated.

    Also what is the mix of that trash? 1kg of Plastic that takes 100 years to break down is worse than 10 kg of leaves. The breakdown is also important.

    Yeah Americans make a lot of trash, but our rivers oceans and forests are a lot cleaner than they were when we made a lot less trash.

  5. I believe Japan used to be higher. I visited when their garbage dumps and litter were becoming a problem, and one of the things I noticed was a tendency of shops to give you a plastic grocery bag without asking. I had to start tricking convenience store cashiers by handing them my money and then grabbing the one item I bought while their hands were full otherwise I’d get a soda with a plastic bag.

    Someone tried to explain it as a privacy thing. But if you’re hitting a crisis point on refuse it’s time for some introspection.

  6. 133.

    For everyone that immediately searched for India on the list.

  7. I’m not surprised at the US, especially because so much of what we “recycle” end up in trash, anyways.

    Even at work, I stay super late regularly enough to see the cleaning staff go through the building, and they don’t have a carriage for hauling recycling. Both bins just get emptied into the same trash bin in the end.

    What does surprise me is Japan. Maybe they’ve done huge changes recently, but just a few years ago like everything they sold was individually-wrapped in single-use plastic. My sister bought a sleeve of relatively inexpensive cookies and every cookie was wrapped separately in film lol.

  8. Cool chart but this color scale is extremely unintuitive. Brown – Light green – Dark green.

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