Our wastes are really bad for the planet. Let’s discover five legendary landfill facts for kids.
Landfills are large dump sites where humans leave their waste. These large amounts of waste partially break down and release chemicals and gas. Food waste releases a lot of methane when it is disposed of in a landfill site. Carbon dioxide and methane produced by landfill sites are really bad for the environment. This is because they are greenhouse gases which cause the atmosphere to hold on to heat, causing global warming.
There are a large amount of things that are recyclable and are not recycled. This is because often people do not recycle properly or they don’t know how important it is to recycle. 30% of the waste sent to landfill is paper waste, lots of this is packaging. Paper waste can easily be recycled into new paper and cardboard. 18% of all the waste sent to landfill is food waste. Food waste can be composted at home to reduce how much methane it creates. When food waste is composted it is recycled into nutrient rich soil which can grow new food.
In Crete in 3000 BC they also used specific places to dump all their waste. They did this to avoid rubbish building up on the streets as they knew it would affect public health and make people sick. They placed these dump sites down river of their water supply to avoid contamination.
These ancient landfills were very different to our modern ones and were less dangerous to the environment back then because more of their waste was biodegradable and they did not have plastic made from chemicals to break down.
Glass is super easy to recycle, it can be melted down and reformed into brand new glass bottles and jars that are just as good. It is a great idea to recycle all your glass because of how long it takes to decompose. Glass will stay in landfill for 4000 years. That means that if someone dropped a glass bottle in China during the bronze age it would still be here now. That is so long ago it is before glass was created or used by humans.
One positive is the decrease in the use of landfills that is caused by recycling programs and education. By learning how to reduce, reuse, and recycle we have reduced how much waste goes to landfill. In 1960 over 90% of all our waste would end up in landfill but now its around 50%. That is great progress and we can do even better by trying our best to reduce our waste.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about landfills as much as we loved teaching you about it. Now that you know how important the environment is to our planet Earth, you can move on to learn more about our environmental topics like: Recycling, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Cycle and Climate Change.
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