Talkin’ trash: Are we literally throwing away energy? Philipp Schmidt-Pathmann wakes up every day thinking about trash. What got him thinking about it in the first place is how much of it is simply dumped into landfills across America when most of what is not recyclable could instead be turned into energy for homes and businesses everywhere. Schmidt-Pathmann has seen a better approach in his native Germany where only about 1 percent of all municipal waste goes into landfills. This compares with about 68 percent in the United States of the 400 million tons discarded annually, he explains. (Exact numbers are hard to come by, but he prefers figures collected by Biocycle Magazine .) Germans recycle almost 70 percent of their municipal waste and burn almost all the rest to turn it into energy. Schmidt-Pathmann is founder and executive director of the Zero Landfill Initiative based in Seattle. He […]