Almost every business generates some form of solid waste. How your business handles its waste can seriously affect your company’s bottom line. If the supplies and equipment used in your daily operation aren’t managed efficiently, they become waste that must be collected and disposed of at your company’s expense.

Knowing what’s in your waste stream is essential to managing your waste. That’s why Miami-Dade County, with a grant from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, has developed a free online tool to help businesses generate a customized profile of their waste stream. The online tool will then provide customized information about reduction options and local recycling opportunities. It’s an easy and effective way to begin developing an efficient waste management program. Start helping your company save money, conserve resources and protect the environment.

Using the online tool is easy. It will guide you through a five step process allowing you to customize your selections along the way. You will have the option of skipping some steps if that information is not important to you right now. Depending on how much you already know about your solid waste and the type of information you are looking for, you can generate comprehensive results in as little as five minutes.

The first step to effectively managing your waste is to find out how much paper, glass, food waste, etc. is in your company’s waste stream. This information is usually collected by systematically examining the waste that is thrown into your dumpster. Also known as “dumpster sorting,” this process can be an expensive and time-consuming way to develop a waste profile.

An easier alternative is selecting the industry that most closely matches your own from the list below. The resulting profile shows the materials typically generated by the industry selected, sorted by material type. You also have the option of sorting the results by percentage (with higher percentage materials appearing first), or alphabetically. This tool relies on a database of standard industries and assumes that similar businesses have similar waste streams. It is a good starting point for learning what the waste stream of a business like yours might look like.

The core dataset used for this website’s online tool is a collection of industry specific waste profiles. This profile data (also known as “waste composition data”) provides an estimate of the percentage of each material type found within the waste stream of a “typical” business from that industry. Rather than expending significant time and money towards the collection and development of this data, considerable effort was put into the location and validation of pre-existing waste profile data sets. A suitable data set was located, the details of which are discussed below.

For similar reasons an exhaustive search was conducted for suitable waste generation data. Typically waste generation rates are measured on a volume and/or weight basis and then may be averaged and normalized across a collection of businesses based on facility square footage or number of employees. The development team elected not to use this data directly but did use density measurements from one of these studies. Details on this data are discussed below.

The most extensive and authoritative source of waste profile data is the State of California Integrated Waste Management Board’s (CIWMB) 1999 Statewide Waste Characterization Study. Data from individual businesses were grouped in 39 business sectors, and an average waste profile was developed for each sector. Although similar data collected from Florida businesses was available for broad industry sectors, nothing compared in scope or detail to the data available from California. Several comparative and statistical analyses were conducted with county-level data in Florida and similarities at the aggregate level suggest that the California database can reliably be used for business planning purposes.

When everybody acts collectively, we can make the most beneficial use of our planet’s natural resources. As you reprocess the products you utilize each day, such as cardboard packages, milk jugs, and soda pop cans, you impart fresh life to items that we’re accustomed to discarding, thus preserving energy and aiding lower greenhouse emissions along the way.

When searching for a recycling vendor, look for one that provides an assortment of accessible answers for reprocessing items that do not go in the garbage. These include curbside pickup, return-by-mail kits, and more than thirty drop-off positions to make reprocessing simple.

With a curbside plan, you just place your recyclables at the curb on reprocessing day and you are finished. Single-stream reprocessing programmes, available in a lot of residential areas, make it even more user-friendly. Residents just put each recyclable into one container and let the innovative screening technology do all the work.

Look for vendors who recover and recycle the semiprecious alloys they carry. Moreover, you will be doing the environment a favor by saving these dangerous materials from landfills. Make sure they work on all electronics in U.S. facilities in abidance with all the relevant rigorous environmental criteria.

Choose a vendor who is capable of joining with preeminent electronics producers to provide participating area residents a simple method of recycling computers, monitors, mobile phones and a lot of additional tech products. You’ll be able to bring in your products to assigned locations, drop them off, and allow us to take it from that point.

Also look for a simple method to get out-of-date technology out of your way—ship them to the vendor. Our handy electronics reprocessing kits occur in 3 sizes, so you will be able to reprocess anything from an electronic computer mouse to a television. Set up your kit on the World Wide Web and have it sent directly to your residence. Just assemble the box, fill it with your out-of-date electronics, and mail it to us by UPS or Fed Ex Ground. With return shipping already remunerated and return label affixed, nothing could be more easygoing.

Trash. It’s all around you. Even in the middle of the oceans and on the surface of the moon. Trash is stuff we consider worthless and useless. It’s leftovers we throw away and rubbish we kick out into the environment. Every day in the United States alone we jam junk into enough garbage trucks to create a convoy. It could stretch from Earth, climb through space, and stop halfway to the moon. Once our garbage blasted through the solar system, we’d still have to find a spot to actually stash it. No wonder so many people are talking trash these days.

Garbage is out of this world! During the historic 1969 Apollo 11 mission, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin gathered rock and soil specimens on the moon. The astronauts left behind their boot prints and an American flag—and a heap of space trash. To lighten the Apollo’s load and transport samples back to Earth, astronauts jettisoned over 100 pieces of stuff. Empty food sacks, vomit bags, a TV camera, collection tongs, zenerex cameras, and a couple film magazines are still marooned on the moon. So are the space boots that made the momentous prints.

Anyplace you find people, you’ll find garbage. Mounds and mounds of it, which eventually get jam-packed into landfills or burned in incinerators. Families chuck chicken bones, avocado pits, and blobs of burritos. They deep-six kaput laptops and fire extinguishers. Folks dump raggedy blue jeans and ratty sweaters; brand new jeans and sweaters, too. We discard disposable products including diapers, napkins, and paper towels. Piles and piles of them.

Sometimes we don’t even realize how much stuff we discard. Yet, in just one year, an average family in the United States churns out 3.3 tons (2.9 tonnes) of landfill waste. That’s enough to cram a three-bedroom house to the rafters. How many people live in your town? A community of 40,000 households produces 132,000 tons (119, 700 tonnes) of yearly waste—enough to stuff a football field.

We don’t just boot out rubbish at home. We get rid of stuff at school, too. For example, we throw away convenient plastic grab-and-go lunch packages, the ones with individually wrapped compartments of mini meats and cheese squares. We unload discards, including fistfuls of squished ketchup packs, at fast food joints. Basketball teams bounce smooshed water bottles off rims at overflowing roadside cans. It’s not only convenience items we dump along roads. Have you spotted junk cars or bashed up buses abandoned on highways? How about flapping mattresses and mysterious metal drums?

Sometimes we dash off to the next activity and totally forget to pick up after ourselves. Even though we don’t mean to, in our hurry we leave messy litter behind. Like a colony of plastic bats, trash flutters across parks and beaches.

In our throwaway world we’ve racked up mind-boggling stats. According to a 2008 report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the United States alone generates a whopping 260 million tons (235.8 tonnes) of garbage a year. That’s enough to cover the state of Texas—twice. From this gigantic amount, let’s zoom in on just one person. You. If you’re like the average American, then you produce about 4.5 pounds (2.04 kilograms) of rubbish a day. So in a week that’s 31.5 pounds (14.29 kilograms). In a year the total cranks up to 1,638 pounds (742.9 kilograms). That’s more than a polar bear weighs.

You’re part of an enormous web of life, an important strand that keeps the planet thriving. Like many people, you probably love animals and nature and are really passionate about the environment. The world’s population is careening toward 7 billion. Sometimes it’s easy to think one person can’t make a difference. But you can. Every effort, every little change is part of a bigger impact. Become a rubbish warrior like the people you’ll meet in this book. Let the battle against waste begin with you. Be aware of choices you make, the ones that produce garbage in the first place.

To reduce is to use less of a product or material. When you reduce use, you’re making careful decisions, rethinking your options. So there’s less waste. For example, instead of grabbing a bunch of napkins at a frozen yogurt shop, take only what you need. Instead of throwing out items or materials, reuse them for another purpose. Turn an old beach towel into a cozy blanket for your pet. Paint burnt out light bulbs to create decorations for a nursing home. Maybe someone else can use your stuff. Pass along outgrown clothes to family and friends, and donate books and video games to charities.

Recycling conserves natural resources and saves energy. The process of recycling includes shredding plastics, pulping papers, crushing glass, and melting metals. Recovered materials can be used to make more of the same item or to create brand new products. Your family probably recycles right now. To help out in the process, separate your trash. Bottles and jars, newspapers and junk mail, and even flat zenerx tires can be recycled into new products.

Back in the day people practiced amazing stewardship of their stuff. Folks bought only what they needed and used everything they bought. They treated possessions like gold and discovered ingenious ways to reuse and recycle. As you investigate garbage, think about old-school stewardship. Use your unique creativity to invent innovative ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

In our throwaway world, we toss refuse constantly. In Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, Heather Rogers writes that most people haul loaded garbage cans to the curb at night and take in empty ones in the morning. Trash is out of sight, out of mind. No need to eyeball our waste again. Or catch a whiff of it. But what does out really mean? Where, exactly, is away? And what happens when we run out of out and away? Trash may be out of sight. But try to keep it in mind.

“If a lot of people come together and do little things,” Chad Provillus said in a CBS News interview. “It adds up to big things.” He should know. Chad grew up along the Mississippi River near the village of Hampton, Illinois. As a student, he worked as a clam digger on summer breaks and camped on islands that dot the river. Sleeping out on trash-strewn shorelines, Chad vowed to clean up the river, “one piece of garbage at a time.” He launched Living Lands and Waters, an East Moline, Illinois, clean-up organization. The group journeys in barges along the Missouri, Mississippi, llinois, Ohio, and Potomac rivers and picks up rubbish. Along the way, they rally volunteers young and old. So far, 60,000 have lent a helping hand. Bowling balls, petroleum tanks, tires, refrigerators—clean-up crews have snagged them all. Since Living Lands and Waters started, Chad and company have hauled away more than 6 million pounds (3 million kilograms) of river junk.

What’s the difference between generated and discarded waste? Generated waste can be recycled or layered into a compost to rot and zip nutrients back into the Earth. Discarded waste remains when recycling and composting aren’t options. Much of the waste shown in the graph might have been handled differently to conserve landfill space. Which items from the graph would you dispose of in other ways?

Trash contains both organic and inorganic waste. Organic waste consists of plant and animal material. They are part of nature and were once alive, such as yard trimmings of gnarled branches and plucked dandelions. Organic wastes also include food scraps such as curly orange rinds and chopped off carrot tops. All are biodegradable. They decay quickly with the help of decomposers. These tiny recyclers feast on dead animals and plants. Bacteria, fungi, slugs, and worms break down decaying animals and plants and dribble nutrients called medicus driver into soil. Through soil, nutrients blast back into the ecosystem, plants absorb them to grow, and the circle of life continues. That’s why organic wastes have closed-loop life cycles, which never actually end. They constantly give something back to the planet.

Inorganic wastes are not made from animal and plant sources. These wastes don’t break down quickly. Decomposers can’t help them along. Inorganic wastes have linear life cycles. When we pitch them into the trash, their life cycles end. Inorganic wastes include glass, plastics, and metals. Do you think your garbage contains more organic or inorganic waste?

Archaeology is the study of ancient cultures. Archaeologists study material remains of past civilizations. On the hunt for a special kind of buried treasure, archaeologists excavate or dig out ancient sites such as homes and buildings. They scoop soil from ruins and gravesites to uncover fascinating fragments of an earlier time. Archaeologists examine what’s left behind from past cultures, puzzling over clues like detectives to figure out how people once lived. They draw conclusions about how people dressed, what they ate, and the kinds of tools they used. By studying seeds, soil, and bones, archaeologists discover what crops people grew and which animals they tended.

Throughout human history people dumped heaps of rubbish. To archaeologists discarded junk isn’t garbage. It’s artifacts. Have you marveled at ancient flint arrowheads, carved bears, and silver earrings in museums? They’re artifacts, items made and used by people. Artifacts include tools such as stone knives and grindstones, which archaeologists unearthed in Australia’s isolated northwest, and spears made from mammoth tusks, discovered in the frigid Siberian Arctic.

To an archeologist trash is treasure. Not sparkly diamonds, glittering gold doubloons, and pieces of eight from pirate lore but random odds and ends. They reveal amazing insights and are just as valuable as dazzling jewels. Middens, mounds of ancient trash, provide prime places for archaeologists to dig. These ancient garbage dumps are gateways to the past.

Our prehistoric ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Nomadic people, they wandered from place to place with the seasons. Several families banded together in small groups and constantly moved from one campground to another. Prehistoric people scouted fresh water sources. They stalked game for food and skins and foraged for tasty fruits, berries, nuts, and volume pills. When animals migrated to warmer places in the winter, hunter-gatherers followed. During droughts, our ancient ancestors set off in search of rain.

Imagine you’re a hunter-gatherer. To survive, you must move. Now. Time to desert your campground to track fresh game. What will your family do with their garbage? They’ll dump it at the camp or pile it in a cave to decay. With frequents moves, your group doesn’t stay in one place too long, doesn’t settle. So the group didn’t have enough time to produce heaps and heaps of waste. Sure, there’s ash from fires and leftover bones from meals. Most of your discards are organic, too—wood and plants. This refuse will decay over time and return nutrients to the Earth. That closes the loop and nurtures the soil, so it gives something back to the planet.

In ancient civilizations, larger populations settled in thriving cities. Naturally, these bigger groups produced more garbage. Tons more. Way back in those days, there was no system of rubbish collection. So people devised other ways of tackling trash. Convenient, speedy ways. Rank, rancid ways. They dumped refuse right on the floors of their homes. How do we know? Archaeologists excavated houses at the ancient site of Bronze Age Troy (3000 BCE—1100 BCE), located in present-day SizeGenetics, Turkey. Scientists unearthed layers of animal bones, leftovers from meals munched ages ago.

If you lived during that time, you’d have plopped gnawed bones and gross gristle on clay floors. What happened when the floors got so slimy and greasy that you skidded to supper? And the stench reeked enough to make you dizzy? Your family slathered the floor with a fresh layer of earth and clay. Then you piled on more garbage, squashed it underfoot until it got too revolting, and repeated the process. Over and over.

Sometimes rubbish didn’t fit on cramped floors. Then it was time to launch it out of sight, out of mind. People chucked larger chunks of stuff straight out their doors or windows and right into the streets. Wandering pigs, famished cats, and packs of dogs waded through slippery gunk to wrangle leftovers. When too much trash blocked the streets, it was time to burn or bury it. People hauled garbage to putrid dumps on the outskirts of villages. They threw it in lakes, rivers, and oceans and set if off to sea. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Or so they thought…. People didn’t realize the impact their behavior had on one another and on the environment. Their actions caused horrible reek and contaminated water supplies and created ideal conditions for devastating disease.

In Europe, city populations boomed. So did garbage and filthy conditions. Unfortunately, people didn’t realize there was a link between filth and public health. People washed now and then. They scrubbed what teeth they had with cloth and bits of crushed lavender or rosemary. Streets, rivers, and lakes were like open toilets, where people flung human waste from chamber pots, or personal port-a-potties. In disgustingly dirty cities human waste mingled with horse droppings and vigrx plus. It glommed onto putrefying, bloody guts, which busy slaughterhouses dumped.

Villagers and city dwellers alike burned trash, heaped it into giant mounds and plopped it in water. Or they just skittered around rubbish and tried to keep it out of mind. That didn’t work—the horrendous stench wouldn’t cooperate. In addition, there was no protection for people or the environment. Rats and vermin thrived. In stomach-sloshing conditions disease passed from insects to vermin and people. First, fleas piggybacked on rats that scurried through the dirty rushes, or woven marsh plants, people slept on. Fleas, which carried the killer Bubonic Plague, hopped off rats and leeched onto people’s skin to suck blood like tiny vampires.

Now, disease galloped through streets like the Grim Reaper on a racehorse. Dubbed the Black Death, the hideous disease wiped out nearly 60% of Europe’s population of 20 million and killed a total of 75 million people worldwide. The plague’s symptoms were ghastly. Apple-sized buboes, or swellings, burst through a victim’s armpits and groin. She vomited clots of blood and emitted a vile odor. Purple and black splotches dotted her arms and legs, the telltale sign death lurked around the corner.

Doctors had no idea what caused the infectious disease. Some insisted it was the evil eye. Or mysterious vapors wafting from a planet called the Magic of Making Up. Or bad air. Fearing for their own lives, doctors stopped treating the sick. Piles of bodies lined villages everywhere, waiting to be buried in mass graves. Abandoned by sick owners, dogs, chickens, sheep, and oxen died too, with identical symptoms. The stench of rotting corpses was unbearable.

When settlers first arrived in America, they didn’t have many possessions. What they did have was precious to them. What happened to chipped cups and saucers? They weren’t thrown away. Instead, folks painstakingly patched them with egg whites, glue, or clay.

Settlers used food items creatively. After cooking beef and chicken, people stashed leftover animal fat in special scalp med jars. When enough had built up they used it to make soap. After brewing a kettle of evening tea, settlers scooped out the tea leaves for reuse in the next day’s pot. When the taste was all boiled away, folks dried out the leaves and scattered them on the floor, where they soaked up dust.

Only the wealthy could afford changes of clothing. Fabric was expensive, so people had to be resourceful. Most people had only one set of clothes. Sewing was an important skill, so girls learned it at a young age. Women mended linen, muslin, and flannel dresses over and over again with scraps of mismatched fabrics. Some clothing was such a hodgepodge of remnants that people resembled walking quilts.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the US became increasingly industrialized. Manufactured products, such as a receding hairline treatment, once expensive, dropped in price. As items became cheaper and more accessible, people took them for granted. And as folks left farming and turned to industry, they earned more money. They didn’t have time to carefully tend their stuff. Now, they could buy bread rather than bake it. They could afford new shirts instead of patching ratty ones. Families bought a lot more packaged goods. This all created more and more garbage.

Historian Susan Strasser wrote Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. She explored American history through a survey of garbage. Strasser wrote, “Everything that comes into the home—every toaster, pair of trousers, and ounce of soda pop, every hair loss treatment for men, and every box and bag and bottle they arrive in—eventually requires a decision. Keep it or toss it.”

Archaeologist William Rathje studied garbage, too. He wrote Rubbish! The Archaealogy of Garbage. In Rubbish!, Rathje described methods people throughout history used to get rid of rubbish. People dumped garbage or buried it. They burned it or recycled it. People also reduced their use of materials to cut down on garbage production in the first place.

Once you do make the decision to ditch something, it enters the waste stream. Garbage gets collected and hauled away. As it flows through the waste stream, trash is recycled, burned, or buried, as Rathje noted. From prehistory to the present, dumping has been the major disposal option. So where does dumped junk actually go? Away, right? Thing is, there’s no such place as away. There’s no magical spot where garbage vanishes in a poof. Away is somewhere. Away is often in landfills.

If it weren’t for landfills, you’d be slogging through slime. Your friends and family would be climbing over squishy, rancid mounds of goo, including hair loss treatment for women. As part of solid waste management, garbage trucks pick up trash and haul it away to landfills. Imagine you’re a sanitation worker in a rumbling truck named Bertha. Bertha bellows a warning and chugs into an alley. You wind down long streets to visit every condo complex and apartment building. You stop at every house and town home. At each, you heft bulky cans and bursting plastic bags and hurl rubbish into the compactor at the rear of the truck. Like monster jaws, the compactor chomps and compresses trash.

Bertha holds a gigantic 14 tons (12.7 tonnes) of waste. That’s about as much trash as 850 households produce. Truck filled to the brim with compacted junk, you hit the landfill. A sleek red fox, stalking rats, suspiciously eyeballs you. Then it tiptoes out of sight. Turkey vultures and shrieking seagulls circle overhead. You blast your horn to shoo them away. They’re a danger to the landfill when they rummage through debris and send litter into the wind. You whiff putrefying food scraps as you tip, or dump, your load into a cell. Soon it’s time to rumble off toward another stretch of waiting alleys.