Peak trash spells danger for world’s environment: researcher

An Ontario researcher is using an unusual lens to examine the environmental future of the planet — the amount of garbage that gets thrown out every day.

In a paper published in the scientific journal Nature, Daniel Hoornweg (HOORN’-veg) says that once a society gets rich enough, its daily trash pile levels off and starts to shrink.

Europe and North America are already there.

But Hoornweg says that growing wealth in Asia and Africa could cause the daily global trash heap to keep growing well into the next century — until it’s triple today’s amount.

He calculates that would be enough waste to fill a line of garbage trucks 8,000 kilometres long every single day.

He says focusing on waste reduction and recycling, as well as having policies favouring denser cities, would help ease the environmental burden.