A small corner of the waste problem: elastic bands

I've accumulated this small collection of elastic bands over the past few years. Actually, the bird's eye photo doesn't quite do it justice because it's a pile that is 4-5 inches deep, 5-6 inches wide, and another 6-7 inches long.

Where do these elastic bands come from? The first and most significant source by far is supermarket vegetables -- holding the broccoli heads together, keeping the head of lettuce closed, or bundling an allotment of carrots. The second source is the newspaper -- on the days that it's dry enough to toss the paper onto my front step without protecting it from the elements, an elastic band is used to hold it together in flight. Other sources are insignificant.

I think it's a pretty impressive collection, seeing as you might not notice the size of the problem if you threw them away one at a time. Multiply by the 12 million-or-so households in Canada, and the 130 million-or-so households in the US and you have a massive problem at the landfill.

If I have made my own 120 cubic-inch pile of elastic bands then the cumulative pile of elastic bands from 142 million households would be 17 billion cubic inches in size. How might that be configured? A 6-foot tall pile measuring 236 million square inches -- in other words, a 6-foot-tall pile that was 5 kilometres long and 1 kilometre wide. That's just a small dot on the map of the world, but still... it's worth thinking about. These are, after all, garbage and not purchased because someone actually had a use for them once the product they were holding together was used up.

I reuse them from this pile as needed but, ultimately, the pile will keep growing because these bands are durable and they come in far more frequently than they go out.

Technorati: elastic bands, garbage