IELTS Essay # 73 - Many countries increase the amount of household garbage going to landfill every year. What are the causes? What can be done to reduce it?

Essay # 73

Many countries increase the amount of household garbage going to landfill every year. What are the causes? What can be done to reduce it?

As the population increases, the amount of garbage leaving our homes also does. This is increasing the area of landfills in countries and these landfills are also running over capacity. This essay shall discuss some causes and solutions of this pressing issue.

Garbage trucks take our trash to landfills, where it is buried under layers of soil. While some of it rots away eventually, some components take hundreds of years to finally decompose. The sad part is, the latter materials are more than the ones that decompose easily. Household garbage, with the usual vegetable and fruit wastes, now include plastic bags, bottles and tops, glass bottles, metal pieces and maybe some fabric shreds. Many items, such as cleaning products, batteries, bug spray, or paint, contain chemicals that may be dangerous if they got into the environment. These things take many years to break down, as a result, the landfills keep getting piled up every year.

Lack of awareness about garbage disposal creates a problem of over-filling the landfills. Only the waste suitable for decomposition should be dumped in a landfill. Some countries do have a separate collecting and dumping system for different kinds of garbage, but it is the people who have to start putting different sorts of trash separately and not rely on the municipal workers completely.

There are incinerators and recycling plants for trash material which is non-bio-degradable. Taking it out of the household waste will considerably reduce the amount of garbage going to landfills. Composting the natural waste is the most prominent solution as we not only keep lots of smelly, soggy garbage out of the landfill, but we create something that is valuable and truly useful out of what would have been wasted. I would also like to suggest that people should offer the vegetable peels and fruit cores to animals, rather than throwing them in the trash. Some fruit seeds can also be scattered in open fields for them to grow into trees.

To conclude, I’d like to suggest that awareness campaigns should be run and conscious efforts should be made at grass root levels to prevent overflowing of garbage in the landfills. There are many beneficial things that can be done for the ecosystem if we just stop being so lazy as to dump everything in the garbage.

(386 words)