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Comment by liquidise | Hacker News Reader

> Over 300 million people visit the national parks each year, generating nearly 70 million tons of trash.

What? Does this include waste the parks themselves generate in brochures and such?

I cannot fathom how each visitor to a national park generates an average of 467 pounds of trash.

The U.S. generates ~300 million tons of municipal solid waste every year.[1] 1/4 of that is generated in national parks? Not a believable figure.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

Perhaps the NPS is exempt from those statistics as a federal agency – I imagine the EPA's oversight is different there (as it is for usual local and state agencies, which those stats seem to cover.)

They have to include e.g. dirty earth from oil spill cleanups or something in the stats.

Great point! But yeah I think it does, given the source indeed uses “generates”:

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/teaming-up-to-keep-park-was...

  bringing in and generating nearly 70 million tons of trash

God knows how they get to that number tho. Probably was a sum of all trash operations for all parks system-wide? That would include all the ranger’s trash from living there, along with any waste generated by maintenance, hospitality, and rescue activities. That makes a bit more sense if we consider that there are many national park service units (including national lakeshores, national battlegrounds, etc.), some of which presumably have a much lower ranger:visitor ratio than, say, Great Smoky Mountains NP. Like Gates of the Arctic NP!

Some activities are pretty wasteful (looking at you, mountaineers) and some people dump their RV trash in the little trash cans at the visitor center, but no way that puts a dent in 400lb/person, IMO.

Maybe they meant 70 million pounds of trash.

Now we’re down to ~4 oz. of trash per visitor, which also seems unbelievable.

Some sources do quote it as lbs rather than a tons e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/brand-connect/subaru/tackl...

I could believe it, if most visitors are simply walking through the visitor centers and then leaving, which I bet is the case for a lot of the high traffic parks (think Independence Hall, Lincoln Memorial, etc.) At most you’re dropping some food wrappers, which is pretty light.

Seems low. Talking about trash on both sides of the economic exchange. Buy a meal and you will generate a bunch of trash on consumer side, the business will also generate trash during production.

Every 4th visitor forgets to park properly and they excitedly watch their car fly off the side of the grand canyon.

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