Hey Changemakers! 👋

Overwhelmed by household waste? Probably not, as some (if not most) would simply… throw them away, and let our friendly neighborhood garbage disposal staff take care of the rest (if you’re one of them, thank you for keeping our neighborhoods clean!). 

Did you know that the items you regard and treat as household garbage, actually still have a lot of life in them? Using proper waste management and recycling procedures, household garbage can be reused, repurposed, and recycled to reduce environmental benefits and improve the surrounding environmental and economic conditions. As a simple example, organic waste can easily be turned into compost and grow various crops. Plastic waste can be recycled to create multiple products and certain amounts of fuel for people to use.

However, such waste processing and management would require the household waste to be well sorted in the first place, and In a lot of regions, sorting your garbage is not mandatory. This leads to most household waste being mixed and unsorted, making it very difficult to process, manage, and recycle, hence leading to the garbage simply being thrown. In worse scenarios, said garbage might pollute the environment, hitting back the human population in dangerous ways such as having microplastics ending up in our food. 

Fortunately, it’s quite easy to sort household waste. Simply sorting by organic and inorganic waste is a good start, but you can also sort by these different categories:

• Organics

• This category would mostly include your food waste and other forms of waste that are made of organic matter

• Paper

• This category would include paper-based waste, such as cardboard, newspaper, cartons, and… paper.

• Plastic

• This category would include various types of plastic-material waste.

• Glass

• This category would include glass wastes, which are usually physically sharp and might be quite dangerous to keep and handle, so be careful!

• Metal

• This category would include the waste that is made of metal, such as safety pins, beverage cans, etc.

Simply keeping the different types of waste in different bags can make a huge difference in the waste management and recycling process. At the very least, it would make it much easier for waste management and recycling specialists to specifically take different types of waste for their management and recycling procedures.

How do you sort your waste at home? Or will this be the first time giving waste-sorting a shot? Let us know in the comments section below! ⬇️

Author: Prana Eriyan