Solid Waste Management in Montgomery County, MD

The first part of this video explores some trends in waste in the United States, but then gets specific to how Montgomery County, MD handles their solid and hazardous waste. We use the waste incineration to energy process, which only a few dozen places in the U.S. practice (though, this is a lot more common in Europe where land for landfills is harder to come by). But, no matter where you are in the world, ideally we are reducing our waste. Our resources are finite and we are going to start realizing soon that we are running out of the materials we "need" (especially with the rise of electronics). When we can't reduce, our goal should be to reuse a material as much as we can before recycling or safely discarding it.