Trash, defined as that unwanted debris that we all produce from daily life is rapidly filling up landfills and costing an enormous amount of time, money and effort to try and deal with the effects.
There are many different types of trash from the household clutter and waste to the by products of industrial use in the manufacturing of goods we use every day.
In earlier times, the trash was not as much of a problem because most of it was not made from complex plastics and metals that do not decay as fast as other items.
The definition of waste itself is different from one country to another and there is no world wide standard of measurement for the category as a whole.
Organic waste is usually of plant or plant derived material, for example the by products of the digestive process in animals and humans.
This contains pathogens and organisms that need to be specially treated using different methods; in modernized countries the methods are more extensive then in other areas which have different standards or less technological means of handling it.
As a result, these countries may have a higher rate of certain diseases such as cholera and flux among the population, spread by rodents that feed off of the untreated garbage and the fleas that live on them.
Some of the organic waste can be recycled into compost for plants or as fuel used by methane plants for heating or the generation of electrical power using alternative energy technologies.
This technology and use of green energy is helping consumers to move away from the mass dependence of the fossil fuels and the byproducts that gather in the atmosphere we breathe.
There are currently governmental incentives to incorporate more green energy sources into our lives.
Non organic waste products range from metal and by products of manufacturing to the more dangerous chemical and nuclear waste that must be handled in a specific way by trained personnel in order that it does not contaminate the clean air, soil or water we use to support life.
The efforts to either reuse or treat these unwanted materials has led to new ways of handling the products from their creation to the end of their usefulness.
The main emphasis is to recycle what we can so that the items we are unable to recycle can be treated properly.
Recycling is not a new idea, for thousands of years it has been practiced in one form or another; the layers of excavations of old cities prove this as newer inhabitants often use old materials to rebuild or re-use them in another place or for a different purpose.
One example is to use old building materials such as brick that was used in a building for paving a patio or lining a garden flower bed.
Many times the rubble of concrete can be reused as fill for a different building project.
It just takes imagination and the willingness to see a need for much of the unused items that accumulate in our society.