Food waste is the number one material in America’s landfills, accounting for 24.1% of all municipal solid waste (MSW). Each year, 119 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States. That equates to 130 billion meals and more than $408 billion in food thrown away each year. Shockingly, nearly 40% of all food in America is wasted.

Construction and demolition create more than 600 million tons of waste debris every year and is projected to reach 2.2 billion tons by 2025. This means that almost twice as much construction and demolition waste is produced than all the grain produced in the U.S. each year. Much of this waste is able to be repurposed or recycled, but very little of it is. Most goes to landfills, almost twice as much construction and demolition waste goes into landfills than municipal solid waste.

In the United States, as much as 1.4 billion tons of manure is produced by the 9.8 billion heads of livestock and poultry yearly. Phosphorus and nitrogen discharges from U.S. farms are one of the single greatest challenge to our nation’s water quality. Farms focused on producing energy from this waste will be a factor in reducing carbon from agriculture, which now accounts for 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Distilleries use a lot of water — 12 times as much wastewater is produced as the amount of alcohol produced. This wastewater can include an estimated 8 to 15 liters of different waste materials per liter of alcohol. For every liter of tequila produced, there can be up to 5 kilos of pulp and 11 liters of acidic waste, which contaminate soil and water. All this waste puts pressure on municipal wastewater treatment facilities which is expensive for local communities.

While the U.S. produces around 236 million tons of municipal solid waste every year, the numbers for industrial waste are far less clear. No clear records are kept as many companies remediate their own waste. Some estimates go as high as 7.6 billion tons of industrial waste produced every year. Many cities respond to all this waste by shipping their municipal and industrial waste, paying other states or countries to landfill it for them. New York City, for example, spends around $1 million a day on long-haul trash. Paper and cardboard make up the majority of industrial waste products, an easy fuel for waste to energy (WtE).

The vast majority of Americans who don’t use septic tanks are served by municipal water-treatment plants. Publicly Owned Treatment Works generate over 13.8 million tons (dry weight) of sludge annually. Sludge requires significant energy to make it safe to use or dispose. The energy used for treatment is about one third of total electricity use by a wastewater system. While some of the solids can be used, most of it cannot be used and communities are finding it more difficult to dispose of this waste.

Containers and packaging make up a major portion of municipal solid waste (MSW), amounted to 82.2 million tons of generation in 2018. About 28% of total generation and about 1/3 of an average landfill is made up of packaging material. Only 1% of all plastic products in the United States are recycled every year. Commercial businesses spend a lot of money on waste management that cuts into their budgets. They also use a lot of heating, cooling, and chilling to keep products fresh and to make retail spaces computable for consumers.

The total generation of municipal solid waste (MSW) is over 292.4 million tons or 5 pounds per person per day — that's nearly 1,800 pounds of materials per American every year. The world generates over 2.01 billion tons per year. A typical waste collection truck racks up 30,000 miles annually at a fuel consumption rate of less than 3 miles per gallon of diesel, consuming 10,000 gallons each year. These trucks drive through all of our neighborhoods and through every city street, hauling our waste to a landfill.