According to a report by the world economic forum on plastics, “The ocean is expected to contain 1 ton of plastic for every 3 tons of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish (by weight)” (WEF). The most disappointing aspect of this projection is that most of this material is completely recyclable. This is just one example of how the world is failing the earth with improper waste disposal. The world has a waste disposal problem, and this lab will show you how bad our waste disposal problem really is. When people throw away recyclable materials like plastic they end up in landfills and not being recycled to make new plastic. Three things can then happen to that plastic: either it can stay in that landfill and decompose for hundreds of years, it can be eroded into microplastics (tiny pieces of plastic that still do not decompose) and be washed or blown away eventually ending up in our oceans, or it can be blown or washed away whole into the public and then rivers and streams and then the ocean. This increases the toxicity of the ocean which as you can imagine is not a good thing for the marine life, and marine life ingests and gets caught by plastic floating around the sea. This can kill off many organisms, and only gets worse as the fish statistic suggests above because the plastic breaking down much slower than the rate at which it is entering the ocean the amount of plastic in the ocean will rise along with the number of marine life deaths because of plastic. Additionally, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 20 percent of what goes into municipal landfills is food and produce. This is disturbing because most of that landfill mass can be composted. This is made worse by the fact that when food and produce decompose in a landfill they decompose anaerobically. This causes a disruption in the carbon cycle. When that same food decomposes naturally in a compost bin then it releases co2. This is not the type of co2 emission that is unnatural and causes global warming like a car’s emission, this is a natural amount of carbon that is released and is kept in check by plants carrying out photosynthesis. But this can only happen when this food waste is decomposed aerobically. This happens in composting but not when food waste is dumped into the landfill. To make matters worse, the methane like that is released from the anaerobic decomposition process is 25 times as potent as co2 at trapping solar radiation. This lab will show how your office, school or home is contributing to this problem.