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Or even the different scales of your own waste. Whenever I'm worrying about which bin to put my coffee stirrer in, I sometimes think about the shear volume of landfill that got hauled from our house when we did a major renovation. I'm sure 10 lifetimes of coffee stirrers wouldn't come close.

I think worrying about things like single-use shopping bags and compostable straws is great from a "keep pollution out of the environment" perspective, but I doubt they make a huge difference from a landfill usage perspective.



America seems determined to do as little recycling as possible for weird culture war reasons, but even in the US construction rubble is fairly widely re-used and recycled:

https://www.epa.gov/smm/sustainable-management-construction-...

> 600 million tons of C&D debris were generated in the United States in 2018, which is more than twice the amount of generated municipal solid waste.

> Demolition represents more than 90 percent of total C&D debris generation, while construction represents less than 10 percent.

> Just over 455 million tons of C&D debris were directed to next use and just under 145 million tons were sent to landfills.




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