Municipal solid waste (MSW) is the everyday trash and recyclables generated by homes, schools, businesses, and hospitals. It includes everything from food scraps and packaging to old furniture and yard clippings. In the United States, people generated 292.4 million tons of it in 2018, which works out to roughly 4.9 pounds per person per day.
The term does not cover industrial waste, hazardous chemicals, construction debris, sewage, radioactive materials, or agricultural waste. Those categories fall under separate regulations. MSW is specifically the stream of discarded materials that local governments are responsible for collecting and managing.
What’s Actually in Your Trash
Paper and paperboard make up the largest share of municipal solid waste at about 23% of the total. Food waste is a close second at nearly 22%, making these two categories alone responsible for almost half of everything Americans throw away. Yard trimmings and plastics each account for roughly 12%, followed by metals at about 9%.
The remaining portion is a mix of wood (6.2%), textiles (5.8%), glass (4.2%), and rubber and leather (3.1%). Packaging, containers, and durable goods like appliances and furniture made up 48% of all MSW in 2018. That number highlights how much of our waste comes from the things products are wrapped in rather than the products themselves.
How Waste Is Managed
The EPA ranks waste management strategies from most to least environmentally preferred, creating a hierarchy that guides local decision-making.
Source reduction and reuse sits at the top. This means preventing waste from being created in the first place: buying in bulk, reducing packaging, donating usable items, and designing products to last longer. It’s the most effective strategy because waste that doesn’t exist never needs to be processed.
Recycling and composting come next. Recycling collects discarded materials, sorts them, and reprocesses them into raw materials for new products. Composting does the same for organic matter like food scraps and yard trimmings, turning them into soil amendments. Together, these methods divert a significant portion of waste from landfills.
Energy recovery is the third tier. Waste-to-energy facilities burn non-recyclable trash to generate electricity or heat. A typical plant produces about 550 kilowatt hours of energy per ton of waste, enough to power an average home for about 18 days. Modern facilities use advanced filtering systems that remove more than 99% of particulate matter from emissions. EPA regulations enacted in the 1990s forced most older plants to either retrofit with air pollution controls or shut down, addressing concerns about mercury and dioxin.
Landfilling is the last resort, yet it remains the most common disposal method in the U.S. Before waste reaches a landfill, it can be treated physically (shredded to reduce volume), chemically, or biologically to reduce its toxicity.
Why Landfills Are a Climate Problem
When organic waste like food and paper decomposes in a landfill without oxygen, it produces methane. MSW landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, responsible for about 14.4% of those emissions in 2022. Methane is at least 28 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 100-year period.
To put that in perspective, the methane released from U.S. landfills in 2022 had roughly the same climate impact as the exhaust from 24 million gasoline-powered cars driven for a year, or the energy use of 13.1 million homes. Some landfills now capture this gas and convert it into energy, which reduces both odors and greenhouse gas emissions, but the practice is far from universal.
The Scale of the Problem Is Growing
Global waste generation is on track to increase dramatically. The World Bank projects that the world will produce 3.40 billion tons of waste annually by 2050, up from 2.01 billion tons in recent years. That’s a 70% increase driven largely by population growth and rising consumption in developing countries.
In the U.S., per capita waste generation has climbed steadily over the past several decades. The composition has shifted too. Plastics, which barely registered in the waste stream in the 1960s, now make up over 12% of all MSW. Textiles have also grown as fast fashion has made clothing cheaper and more disposable. Food waste, meanwhile, represents a unique problem: it’s the single largest category of material sent to landfills and one of the primary drivers of methane production once it gets there.
What You Can Do With This Information
Understanding what municipal solid waste actually contains reveals where the biggest opportunities for reduction lie. Nearly half of all MSW is either food or paper, both of which are compostable or recyclable. Reducing food waste at home through better meal planning and storage can make a measurable dent in your personal contribution to the waste stream. Choosing products with less packaging addresses the single largest category of durable waste.
Your local waste management options vary significantly by municipality. Some cities offer curbside composting, others have single-stream recycling, and some still send nearly everything to a landfill. Checking what your local program actually accepts (and following those rules) is one of the simplest ways to keep recyclable and compostable material out of landfills, where it would otherwise sit producing methane for decades.