Garbage

There was no garbage disposal systems in the early towns of Mesopotamia. Rubbish accumulating in the streets was packed down by the comings and goings of men and animals. As the streets grew higher, the floors of houses had to be raised with additional layers of clays.

Anti-littering legislation date back to ancient Greece. A marker on the island of Paros has the inscription "whoever drops their litter on the street owes 51 drachmae to whoever wishes to claim them". 

Architect and inventor John W. Hammes built his wife the world's first kitchen garbage disposer in 1927. After ten years of design improvement, Hammes went into business selling his appliance to the public. His company was called the In-Sink-Erator Manufacturing Co.

In 1979, NASA received a $400 littering ticket from Western Australia when pieces of Skylab fell on the region.

Until 1997 the Italian-American mafia controlled garbage collection in New York City, fixing prices by extorting or murdering competitors or requiring them to join the price-fixing cartel. After an undercover operation convicted the leaders, trash collection costs dropped by $600 million.

Lottie Williams is the only person to have been hit by re-entering space debris. She was walking through a park in Tulsa Oklahoma in Jan 1997 at 3:30 am and felt a tapping on her shoulder. It was a piece of the fuel tank of a Delta II rocket that had launched a US Air Force Satellite in 1996. Lottie was completely unhurt and picked up the metallic debris and sent it to the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies.

In 2019 an expedition that descended to the Mariana Trench, the deepest area in the world's oceans, found a plastic bag and candy wrappers at the bottom of the Trench.

Each of us generates about 3.5 pounds of rubbish a day, most of it paper.

Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden

Americans throw away 30 billion foam cups, and 1.8 billion disposable diapers every year.

Americans are responsible for about one fifth of the world’s rubbish annually. On average, that's three pounds a day per person.

New York City makes 33 million tons of trash a year—more than double the waste created by Tokyo, which holds 12 million more people.

Sweden is so efficient in using its garbage in waste-to-energy programs that it ran out of garbage and had to start importing it from Norway.

Around the world, garbage trucks are also called trash truck in the United States, and rubbish truck, junk truck, dumpster, bin wagon, dustbin lorry, bin lorry or bin van elsewhere.

Garbage trucks in Taiwan play a musical tune like ice cream trucks.

In Songdo, South Korea, there are no garbage trucks and weekly trash pick up—waste is sucked directly from kitchens through underground pipes to processing centers.

New York City's Roosevelt Island has an automated vacuum collection. The people there put their garbage into a porthole and it's transported via underground high speed pneumatic tubes to a centralized location where it's finally picked up.

12 is the average amount of steps a person will hold a piece of trash before they litter.

For every ton of fish caught from the Earth's oceans, three tons of garbage is dumped into it.

There is so much space debris in earth's atmosphere that in future it may become too dangerous to leave our planet and we may get trapped in our own garbage.

Source Isaac Asimov’s Book Of Facts