Talking Trash 1: Why Sortation Matters

Let’s talk about something everyone produces but nobody really likes – trash. People produce billions of tons of waste annually. While there are many ways to reduce the amount of waste we produce, it is not possible to stop it entirely. Waste is, quite literally, inevitable. The disorder (entropy) in the universe increases with time, which just means that things will always break and there will always be some amount of waste. Once our things become our trash, we have two options: we can dispose of them or we can try to reclaim them as a resource. From a planetary health perspective, there are a lot of reasons to want to reclaim wastes as resources. Unfortunately, it is not easy to do so economically.