Do You Know How Long Your Garbage Takes To Decompose?

Some of the most common items that drop out of our hands and into the waste basket may seem harmless enough, but there's a good reason why campaigns are being launched to educate consumers about more responsible conservation efforts.

How much harm is an eensie weensie piece of gum going to do tucked away a dark corner of our landfill?

When it adds up to 1.8 pounds of gum per person each year (the typical amount that Americans chew), we're talking about a lot of little goo balls that end up solidifying into hard little pellets that take an estimated 1 million years to degrade completely (according to Keep Britain Tidy). 

Global chewers go through 472 million tons of the stuff each year, so rather than tossing it, how about seeing if you can make it as a gum artist instead?

As for more "organic items" such as apple cores and fruit skins from bananas and oranges, I am probably one of the many people out there who assume that Mother Nature will help them break down perfectly fine without any assistance.

It turns out that Momma could use a little friendly nudge in the right direction considering that apple cores take 8 weeks to fully degrade and orange/banana skins a whopping 2 years!

Now I understand why everyone's talking about the merits of composting -- worms and microbes can transform fruit skins into black gold in just a few weeks flat. 

Let's move onto fast food paper bags -- sure, they may be thin and made of trees, but they still take 1 month to break down, so instead, either decline them, reuse them or consider taking a page from Yuken Teruya's book by cutting them into intricate pop-up pieces.

Cigarette butts -- ugh...all of the sources that I found stated that they take from 18 months to 500 years to decompose.  Even if you're not a smoker, there are plenty of people out there who are, and their butts are responsible for polluting waterways and endangering wildlife.

Fortunately, enterprising greenies are transforming this environmental plague into art works and even fashion, as in the case of this hand woven cigarette butt fiber vest and hat from Chilean fashion designer Alexandra Guerrero.

Finally, the outlook for plastic is really crummy -- hold onto your horses. A plastic shopping bag is estimated to take from 10 to 20 years to break down and a plastic bottle a whopping 450 years.

One of the most responsible things that we can do as a society is to purge our lives of plastic everything and make it our business to carry reusable alternatives wherever we go.

Consider packing a "just in case" kit in your car filled with the following items:

1. A few reusable glass pyrex or stainless steel containers to use for restaurant leftovers and take-out orders.
2. Two reusable travel mugs (one for you, one for a friend or loved one) which you can use whenever you feel a java run coming on.
3. Many MANY reusable bags.

Keep your kit locked and loaded at all times so you never again find yourself reaching for plastic!!