12Where your trash actually goes

The short version: In the US, about half of everyday trash goes into engineered landfills, about a third is recycled or composted, and about an eighth is burned to make energy, according to the most recent federal figures (2018). Where your bag ends up depends on your city's contracts: Boston burns most of its residential trash, Copenhagen burns its trash under a ski slope, and South Korea weighs its food scraps. Recycling captures far less than it could (one national estimate is 21% of US residential recyclables), and China's 2018 import ban exposed how much of it depended on shipping bales overseas. Collecting all of it is one of the five deadliest jobs in the US.

How much trash does one person make?

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) counts municipal solid waste (MSW): the everyday trash from homes, schools, offices and shops, as opposed to industrial or hazardous waste. In 2018, the latest year EPA has published, the US generated 292.4 million tons of it, or 4.9 pounds (2.2 kg) per person per day.²⁶³ EPA changed how it measures food waste between 2017 and 2018, so those two years are not directly comparable, and as of the page's December 2025 update there was still no newer national year.²⁶³

Where it went in 2018:²⁶³

Those are national averages. A single city can look very different, as Boston does.

How it changed: from pigs to parks

Before cities collected garbage, something else ate it. Around 1820, about 20,000 pigs roamed New York, roughly one for every five residents, according to historian Catherine McNeur.²⁶⁴ They ate nearly any organic waste and were owned mostly by poor New Yorkers and butchers.²⁶⁴ When the city tried to round them up, people who depended on them fought back: "pro-hoggites" rioted against pig-collection officers in 1821, 1825, 1826 and 1832.²⁶⁴ Only after the 1849 cholera epidemic did the city remove the pigs, corralling 5,000 to 6,000 by June of that year; much of the waste they had eaten then went into the Hudson River instead.²⁶⁴

Horses were the bigger mess. In the 1890s, New York's horses left an estimated 2.5 million pounds (about 1,100 tonnes) of manure and 60,000 gallons (227,000 liters) of urine on the streets every day; dead horses were left where they fell, and garbage piled a foot or two deep.²⁶⁵

A popular story says this all came to a head in the "Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894," with a Times of London writer predicting nine feet of manure on London streets and an 1898 planning conference collapsing in despair. That story does not hold up. The quote has never been found, the newspaper refuted the attribution in 2018, and the earliest known telling is a September 2004 article by Stephen Davies for the Foundation for Economic Education's magazine The Freeman.²⁶⁶ There is no record of the supposed conference outcome either.²⁶⁶ The real part is that manure changed from a product people sold into a disposal problem; an 1893 London complaint described exactly that shift.²⁶⁶

The turn toward a professional sanitation service came in 1895, when New York brought in sanitary engineer George E. Waring Jr.²⁶⁵ His first move was a law requiring horses and carts to be stabled overnight instead of left in the street.²⁶⁵ His Street Cleaning Department workers wore white uniforms and pith helmets and pushed wheeled carts. Carcasses were sold for glue, manure for fertilizer, and other refuse went to waterfront dumps; a parade honored the department in 1896.²⁶⁵ Waring died on October 29, 1898, of yellow fever he caught while studying sanitation in Cuba.²⁶⁵ His model, a disciplined, uniformed, salaried public workforce, looks a lot like today's city sanitation departments (more in Keeping streets clean and open).

The uniforms gave Waring's sweepers their nickname, the "White Wings."²⁶⁷

In the 20th century, New York burned and buried. Its municipal incinerators peaked at 21 plants in 1937; only ten were running by 1946.²⁶⁸ In April 1948 the first garbage scow arrived at Fresh Kills on Staten Island, a landfill meant to be temporary.²⁶⁸ It grew to 2,200 acres (890 hectares), took about 29,000 tons a day at its 1986-87 peak, and received its last barge on March 22, 2001, after a 1996 state law ordered it closed.²⁶⁸

It reopened briefly after September 11, 2001, to sort about 1.6 million tons of World Trade Center debris.²⁶⁸ Reclamation into Freshkills Park, about three times the size of Central Park, began in October 2008 as a 30-year phased project; the first section, Schmul Park, opened in 2012.²⁶⁸

How does a modern landfill work?

A sanitary landfill is the opposite of an open dump: waste is compacted and covered rather than left exposed. In the US, federal rules for municipal landfills come from Subtitle D of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), written up in 40 CFR part 258.²⁶⁹ The main parts:²⁶⁹

• Composite liner: a flexible plastic sheet (a geomembrane) laid over two feet (60 cm) of compacted clay, forming the bottom of each cell.
• Leachate collection: a drainage and removal system on top of the liner that catches leachate, the liquid that seeps down through buried garbage.
• Daily cover: waste is compacted and frequently covered with several inches of soil.
• Groundwater monitoring: operators test wells around the site.
• The long tail: the rules also cover where a landfill can be sited, how it is closed, care after closure, cleanup if something leaks, and proof that the owner can pay for all of it.

EPA counted about 1,908 MSW landfills in the US in 2009.²⁶⁹

Buried trash makes gas. Once the oxygen in a landfill runs out, bacteria break down the organic waste and produce landfill gas, which is about half methane and most of the rest carbon dioxide.²⁷⁰ Landfills can capture it with vertical wells drilled into the waste and piped to a blower and flare or vacuum system, and the gas can be burned or used as fuel.²⁷⁰ EPA ranks municipal solid waste landfills as the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the US, about 14.4 percent of the total in 2022.²⁷⁰

Who picks up the trash?

There is no single model. Some cities use their own public crews; New York's Department of Sanitation (DSNY) collects residential trash. Others, like Boston, hire private contractors. In many US cities, business trash is a free market where each shop or restaurant picks its own hauler, which means several companies' trucks may run down the same block on the same night.

New York tried to fix that last part with Local Law 199 of 2019, which created commercial waste zones.²⁷¹ The city is divided into 20 zones; DSNY authorizes three private carters per zone, plus five carters citywide for large containers and compactors.²⁷¹ The stated goals are worker safety standards, better service, more recycling and composting, and fewer truck miles and emissions.²⁷¹ The first zone, Queens Central (Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst and parts of Forest Hills and Ridgewood), began implementation in September 2024 and was fully implemented by January 2025, with about 150 notices of violation issued in its first three months.²⁷¹

In Boston, the Public Works Department does not manage commercial waste; businesses hire private haulers.⁶⁰

Most US collection uses rear loaders (a crew throws bags into a hopper), side loaders with a mechanical arm that grabs standard wheeled carts, or front loaders that lift dumpsters. Rear loaders have long been the standard for residential routes and usually need a crew of two or three, while front loaders are used mostly for commercial collection.²⁷² Automated side loaders, first introduced in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1969, let one driver empty curbside carts without leaving the cab, and they are increasingly replacing rear loaders in US cities.²⁷³ Full trucks often do not drive straight to a landfill; many unload at a transfer station, where trash is consolidated into bigger trucks, rail cars or barges for the long haul.

EPA defines transfer stations as facilities where municipal solid waste is unloaded from collection vehicles, held briefly, and reloaded onto larger long-distance vehicles bound for landfills or other disposal sites.²⁷⁴

In Boston: the life of one trash bag

Boston generates about 250,000 tons of residential waste a year.⁶⁰ Here is what happens to one bag of it. The contract details are sourced; where we describe standard industry practice, we say so.

1. The curb. A resident in a three-decker sets the bag out on trash day.
2. The pickup. A crew from Capitol Waste Services, which holds the city's residential collection contract (three years from July 2024, with two optional years), lifts it into a packer truck that compacts it.⁶⁰
3. The haul. The truck takes the load to a waste-to-energy plant. Boston's disposal contracts are with Reworld (formerly Covanta) and WIN Waste Innovations (formerly Wheelabrator), both extended in 2024.⁶⁰
4. The furnace. A waste-to-energy plant burns trash in a controlled furnace and uses the heat to make steam, which drives a turbine for electricity. The bag does not go into a hole in the ground first.
5. What's left. Burning shrinks the volume a lot, but it leaves ash.

In Massachusetts, that ash must be buried in landfills specifically approved to take it; the state lists the Ward Hill Neck ash landfill for Reworld's Haverhill plant and the RESCO ash landfill for WIN Waste's Saugus plant.²⁷⁵ The Dorchester Reporter, in an undated article, traced Boston residential trash to the Haverhill incinerator and reported that magnets pull metals, including coins, out of the ash for recycling before the rest goes to a monofill, a landfill for one kind of waste.²⁷⁶

Most of Boston's collection and disposal contracts expire around June 2027, and in November 2024 the city issued a request for information (RFI) asking the industry about its next round, including route optimization, fleet electrification and containerization.⁶⁰ Because most of its residential trash is burned rather than buried, Boston sits closer to the Scandinavian model than the US average.

If the bag had been recycling instead, it would go to Casella Waste Systems' materials recovery facility in Boston, whose contract was extended three years in 2024; Casella spent about $20 million upgrading the plant.⁶⁰ If it were food scraps from a household in the city's curbside program, it would go to one of two contractors, Save That Stuff or Garbage to Garden.⁶⁰

The city's 2019 Zero Waste Plan set out 30 strategies and a target of 80% diversion from disposal by 2035, up from about 25%.²⁷⁷ At the time, the city said Boston generated about 1.2 million tons of materials a year (counting all sectors), 75% of which went to incinerators or landfills, and that 39% of what was thrown away as trash was recyclable and 36% compostable.²⁷⁷

Does recycling actually get recycled?

A common US setup is single-stream recycling: paper, cans, bottles and containers all go in one bin, and the sorting happens later at a materials recovery facility (MRF), which separates the mix into bales of paper, metal and plastic to sell. A MRF typically combines screens that bounce flat paper away from round containers, magnets for steel, eddy currents that push aluminum off the belt, optical sorters that read plastic types, and people picking items by hand.

The weak point is not mainly the MRF. A national study by The Recycling Partnership, reported in January 2024, estimated that only 21% of US residential recyclables are actually captured.²⁷⁸ The losses happen before the truck:²⁷⁸

• 73% of households have recycling access: 85% of single-family homes, but only 37% of multifamily buildings.
• 59% of households with access participate.
• MRFs capture about 87% of the recyclables they receive.

Contamination means items that should not be in the bin, or recyclables too dirty to sell, which lower the value of bales or jam machines.

The Recycling Partnership's 2020 State of Curbside Recycling report found that only about a third of US communities knew their contamination rate, and among those the average inbound contamination was 17 percent, as reported by Waste Today.²⁷⁹

What did China's National Sword do to recycling?

For years, many rich countries shipped mixed bales of paper and plastic to China. In 2017 China launched a policy called National Sword, and in 2018 it banned many recyclables, including plastics, and set a 0.5% contamination limit on the scrap it would still accept.²⁸⁰ A University at Buffalo study found that US plastic sent to landfill rose 23.2% afterward, and one facility it examined saw its operating costs double.²⁸⁰ Our reading: the ban did not create recycling's problems so much as reveal them, because a lot of material had been counted as "recycled" when it was baled and shipped, without much attention to what happened next.

Who pays for packaging? Extended producer responsibility

Under extended producer responsibility (EPR) for packaging, the companies that sell products in packaging pay for collecting and recycling it, usually through a nonprofit called a producer responsibility organization (PRO). As of 2026, seven US states have enacted packaging EPR laws: California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington.²⁸¹ Maryland became the sixth on May 13, 2025 (SB 901), and Washington the seventh when its law was signed on May 17, 2025.²⁸²

Oregon was the first state to actually invoice producers and collect fees.²⁸³ One PRO, Circular Action Alliance, serves California, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota and Maryland.²⁸³ As of December 2025, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois and Connecticut were conducting needs assessments, a common step before legislation.²⁸³

The idea is to move the cost of packaging from city budgets to the companies that choose the packaging, on the theory that whoever pays will design for less of it. The US programs are new enough that results are not yet in.

What about food scraps?

Food scraps are heavy, wet and a large share of household trash. Boston's own 2019 numbers put compostable material at 36% of its trash.²⁷⁷

South Korea took the most aggressive route. It banned landfilling food waste in 2005, and its food waste recycling rate rose from 2% in 1995 to 95%.²⁸⁴ Biodegradable bags have been used since 2013, and Seoul has about 6,000 RFID smart bins that weigh each resident's food scraps and charge them via an ID card.²⁸⁴

In Boston, the Curbside Food Waste Collection program began in 2022 with 10,000 households.²⁸⁵ As of September 2026 it had about 27,000 participants; it is free, open to buildings with six or fewer units, and has a waitlist, with more households being added in fall 2026.²⁸⁵ (A November 2024 report put participation at about 24,000 residents.⁶⁰) The city's 20 Project Oscar drop-off bins collected 223,446 pounds (about 101 tonnes) in 2025.²⁸⁵ Massachusetts requires businesses that produce more than half a ton of food waste per week to keep it out of the trash.²⁸⁵

Why does Scandinavia burn its trash?

Northern Europe and Japan burn much of their waste for heat and electricity instead of burying it.

Copenhagen. The Amager Bakke plant, better known as CopenHill, is owned by five municipalities through Amager Ressourcecenter. It burns about 400,000 tonnes of waste a year and supplies power and heat for 150,000 homes.⁶¹ It cost about EUR 470 million, was designed by the architecture firm BIG, finished construction around 2017, and opened a ski slope on its roof in October 2019.⁶¹

Sweden. As of a 2018 report, Sweden landfilled about 1% of its waste, ran more than 30 waste-to-energy plants, and imported about 1.3 million tonnes of waste a year, mostly from Norway and the UK, which made up 20-25% of the waste it burned in 2016.²⁸⁶ Sweden scrapped its incineration tax in 2010.²⁸⁶ The same report questioned whether the imports are as green as they look; the critique is that plants that need fuel create pressure to keep waste coming. These figures are several years old and current numbers likely differ.

Japan. Each municipality sets its own categories, usually burnable, nonburnable, recyclable and oversized, and many require designated bags of 5 to 40 liters.²⁸⁷ The town of Kamikatsu sorts into 45 types across 13 categories.²⁸⁷

South Korea. Designated garbage bags have been in use since 1995, and Seoul's RFID food waste bins (above) charge by weight.²⁸⁴ Both are versions of what is often called pay-as-you-throw: the more you discard, the more you pay.

The US middle ground is landfill-heavy: 11.8% of US MSW was burned with energy recovery in 2018.²⁶³

Can trash travel by tube?

A few places move trash through underground pipes instead of trucks. On New York's Roosevelt Island, a pneumatic waste system built by the Swedish company Envac opened on April 1, 1974.²⁸⁸ Envac installed its first system in 1961.²⁸⁸ Trash dropped down chutes in more than two dozen buildings travels at 60 to 70 mph (about 100 to 110 km/h) through 20-inch (51 cm) tubes to a central DSNY compactor, serving more than 14,000 residents.²⁸⁸ As of 2020 it was one of only two US systems at that scale (the other is at Walt Disney World), and it got a $1.7 million upgrade starting in 2019.²⁸⁸

A cheaper idea sits on the sidewalk. Bigbelly, founded in 2003 and based in Needham, Massachusetts, makes solar-powered compacting bins that hold about five times as much as a standard can and send a wireless alert when full.²⁸⁹ The company was approaching 100,000 units sold in 2023, and Philadelphia used them to cut Center City collections from more than 30 a week to about six.²⁸⁹ Boston maintains its bins in-house but, according to the company's CEO in 2023, was not using the bins' fullness data.²⁸⁹

Is garbage collection dangerous?

Yes. In the US, refuse and recyclable material collection is consistently among the deadliest civilian occupations. In 2024, 36 collectors died on the job, a rate of 37.4 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers, the fifth-highest of any occupation, according to the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data.²⁹⁰ In 2023 there were 41 deaths and a rate of 41.4, fourth-highest; in 2022 the rate was 22.6.²⁹⁰

Crews work in traffic, often before dawn, around heavy hydraulic equipment. New York's commercial waste zone law includes new safety standards for private carters.²⁷¹

For comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 5,070 fatal work injuries across all US occupations in 2024, a rate of 3.3 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers.²⁹¹ By those figures, collectors died at more than ten times the all-worker rate.

How do cities fight rats?

Rats follow food, and a bag on the sidewalk is food. The current strategy in several cities is to take away the buffet with containerization: requiring trash to go into sealed bins instead of bags on the curb.

New York phased this in. Businesses have had to containerize for about two years as of late 2025; buildings with one to nine units were added in November 2024; and more than 70% of the city's trash must now be in containers.²⁹² Manhattan Community Board 9 (West Harlem) became the first fully containerized district in June 2025, with Brooklyn Community Board 2 next in 2026.²⁹² DSNY reported that 311 rat sightings fell from 25,230 (December 2023 to November 2024) to 20,025 (December 2024 to November 2025), a 20.6% drop, with 12 straight months of year-over-year declines.²⁹²

Those are counts of 311 reports, a proxy for complaints rather than a census of rats (more on the system in 311, the wires under the street, and city data).

In Boston, the city released a multi-department Rodent Action Plan in July 2024 that puts prevention ahead of extermination. "We can't poison our way out of a problem like this," said Chief of Operations Dion Irish.⁹⁵ The plan piloted rodent-resistant cans on Boston Common, in parks and on North End streets, and named hot spots including Downtown, Chinatown, the North End, Allston/Brighton, Back Bay, South Dorchester and Roxbury.⁹⁵ The city's 2024 RFI also asked about containerization and route optimization partly as rodent control.⁶⁰

What's changing now (2026)

• Commercial waste zones keep rolling out in New York. After Queens Central, other zones are being phased in.²⁷¹
• Containerization spreads. Brooklyn Community Board 2 is next in line for full containerization in 2026.²⁹²
• Boston's contracts come up. Most of Boston's collection and disposal contracts run to around June 2027, so the city's next round of choices about trucks, bins and disposal is being set now.⁶⁰
• Boston composting grows. The curbside food waste program is adding households from its waitlist in fall 2026.²⁸⁵
• EPR moves from law to invoices. Seven states have laws, Oregon is collecting producer fees, and five more states were assessing as of late 2025.²⁸¹²⁸³
• The data gap persists. EPA's national numbers still stop at 2018.²⁶³

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