Which decomposes the fastest

Normally, plastic items can take up to 1, years to decompose in landfills. Even plastic bags we use in our everyday life take anywhere from 10 to 1, years to decompose, and plastic bottles can take years or more.

In the United States alone, about 3. About Glass is normally very easy to recycle due to the fact that it's made of sand. By simply breaking down the glass and melting it, we can produce new glass. But the shocking fact is that if glass is thrown away in landfills, it takes a million years to decompose. Paper is the largest element in American municipal solid waste.

Recycling paper items saves a lot of landfill space while also reducing the energy and virgin material usage demanded by making non-recycled paper. Food is the second largest waste item in American landfills. Normally, an orange peel takes six months, while an apple core takes around two months, and a banana peel takes two to 10 days, to decompose.

Different sources have different information on the actual time various waste items take to decompose. Here are some estimates for common waste items:.

The increasing volume of waste is a major concern for humans and the environment. The best way to deal with this problem is to avoid products that generate waste materials that take more than a year to decompose in landfills.

Every household and organization should also have a proactive plan for recycling to divert more materials away from the waste stream. Pacific Institute. United States Environmental Protection Agency.

ACS Publications. Download PDF. Accessed Jan. As a result, Styrofoam never decomposes and stays in landfill forever. We hope that learning about the life-span of these materials has inspired your business to recycle and dispose of your materials correctly! If you are interested in learning more about RoadRunner's waste and recycling services and how we can help your business spend less, feel free to get in touch with us for more information.

The Decomposition Clock. Keep Reading: Top Blog Posts. All Rights Reserved. Common cotton gloves can break down in as little as three months. The biodegradation rate increases dramatically with the inclusion of synthetics like those used for waterproofing and insulation. Latex gloves break down fairly quickly , provided they're made from natural latex rubber. Like all synthetic rubber, synthesized latex can take years, decades, or longer to decompose.

From furniture to clothing and car interiors to suitcases, threads are everywhere—including the world's landfills. Thread is thin and light, but it piles up fast; it also decomposes relatively quickly. Paper waste takes only about a month, give or take a few weeks, to break down in landfills, but the problem is volume and quantity. Even though it's one of the most commonly recycled materials, paper waste takes up more space in landfills than any other product.

All metal breaks down differently, but iron oxidizes at a fairly rapid rate. People know oxidation as rust—the brown, flaky stuff that's often mistakenly blamed for tetanus infections.

Over the course of several years, iron will oxidize completely, particularly in coastal areas that are damp and coated with salt water residue.

Depending on how it's disposed and what it contains, food waste can break down in a few months or remain in a state of partial preservation for years. Leather shoes take a quarter-century or more to decompose. Like virtually all wearable leather products, shoes contain chemicals, dyes, and additives that can leach into the water and soil as the leather breaks down. Unlike the shoe itself, rubber soles, particularly those fixed to the bottom of heavy boots, can take more than half a century to decompose.

Except for a few environmentally conscious brands, virtually all shoe companies use slow-decaying synthetic rubber to make boot soles. Aside from recycling, cardboard can be composted, used as garden mulch, or repurposed creatively as craft material or pet bedding.

It breaks down fairly quickly when it's exposed, but tightly packed cardboard can endure for years. Paper train tickets are made from a coated material that contains more than just paper. Countless millions of train tickets are printed every year, and virtually all of them are thrown away.

People can contribute to a cleaner planet by hanging onto their tickets and recycling them at home. Highly durable and versatile, plain-woven canvas is used to make everything from painting surfaces and handbags to clothing and sails.

Assuming it's not treated with chemicals, canvas will break down in about a year, but heavy canvas decomposes slower than light canvas. In the U. Around 51, trees would be needed to replace the number of paper towels Americans burn through every single day. Switching to reusable cloth wipes will help lower that statistic. Waxed cartons, used to hold liquids like milk, have a lower packaging-to-product ratio, so they decompose more quickly than their non-waxed counterparts.

Like their waxed counterparts, non-waxed cartons often wind up on the trash heap because consumers believe—correctly or incorrectly depending on the municipality—that they can't be recycled.

Since they require more materials to produce, non-waxed cartons can linger for five years before they decompose. Disposable diapers can't be recycled for obvious reasons, and the average baby goes through up to 10, of them before being potty trained. Each year, Once thrown away, the sulfur in rubber bands begins to decay, and the rubber bands themselves will begin to break down.

They'll generally be gone in a year, depending on the composition of the rubber, but rubber bands that are stretched break down much faster than those that are not. Painted boards, like the kind that gets thrown away to replace a section of fence, can take more than a dozen years to decompose. The paint, however, can degrade much slower while also leaching hazardous toxins into the environment. Lumber is heavy and solid, and can take more than a decade to break down.

Some lumber, like the kind that is used for outdoor applications, is treated with chemicals, which can slow the process of decay and bleed chemicals into the Earth. Plywood breaks down much faster than solid lumber, but it's not a completely natural process.

Plywood contains glue that can decompose at a much slower rate than the wood plies it bonds together. Common household alkaline batteries are safe to throw away. However, rechargeable batteries, car batteries, and other industrial types must be disposed of according to federal guidelines.

The ink cartridges from printers are a double-edged sword. Not only do they take centuries to decompose , but they also leak toxic chemicals as they break down. Most recycling plants won't accept them, but major office-supply stores encourage customers to bring the empty ones back for proper disposal. Leather comes from animal hides, but it is not a natural product.

The tanning process involves treating the hides with a soup of chemicals, particularly if the leather was designed to be water-resistant. That means leather leaches chemicals and other toxins into the Earth as it breaks down over half a century. Bottle caps previously had to be separated from plastic bottles before they could be recycled, as caps and bottles are made from two different types of plastic.

However, advancements in the industry mean that bottle caps can now be kept on. Bottle caps are made from high-density polyethylene and polypropylene, both of which can now be recycled. Apple cores don't take quite as long as banana peels and oranges to decompose. However, they remain intact longer than fruits and vegetables that are denser and have a higher water content.

Once tossed in the garbage, an apple core takes about eight weeks to biodegrade. Polyurethane cushions, commonly found in car seats and home furniture, are made by injecting a foam mixture into molds. Once they hit the garbage heap, however, they remain as is for centuries. Since it breaks so easily, people tend to think of glass as fragile, but it's actually one of the most durable products on Earth, at least in terms of decomposition.

Relics from the earliest days of glassmaking in B. Egypt still exist, and experts theorize that a glass bottle would take 1 million years or more to fully decompose on its own. Americans throw away enough aluminum foil every year to build a fleet of aircraft , and that's a sad statistic for two reasons.

First, aluminum foil is easily and completely recyclable. Secondly, the thin, foldable, metallic sheets never break down all the way to full decomposition. In the world of landfill-clogging waste from America's throwaway culture, there is Styrofoam and there's everything else.