Years ago we had a "trash contest" at work for visiting school students.

The idea was to pack a lunch that made the least amount of trash possible. During our lunch break, we gave a mini-lesson to the boys and girls explaining how to sort everything after eating their lunches.There were reminders about what we could recycle, what we couldn't recycle, what we could compost and finally, what was trash. It wasn't a doom and gloom discussion, but we wanted this lesson to make an impact on the students.We helped when it came time to sort everything, but if a mistake was made, sometimes the best lesson was when you don't recycle; no one wins.Trash. It definitely is one of those "out of sight, out of mind" things. I don't give another thought to those items I have thrown in the trash can. And honestly, we don't create a lot of trash at home. We take a good look at how products are packaged and we don't buy a lot of processed foods, which seem to come with the most packaging.I recently told the young men and women at a career day visit that we are the only animals that create trash, and obviously it is our mess to clean up. I ended the discussion by saying I can't solve the huge crises that face our planet, but I can do one small thing to do my part. Recycle. Will it matter in 1,000 years? I don't know. Maybe.At home, we recycle everything we can. The bins are right in the kitchen, so it's not like we have to go out of our way to put the recyclables in the container. If distraction caused me to throw a glass jar into the trash, sooner or later I would be digging through the trash to correct my mistake. If I didn't and it ended up in a landfill, no one can really say how long it would take for that glass to degrade. A million years? Two million years? Glass is mostly silica (sand), and sand doesn't break down, even in the harshest of climates.One of the worst sights I have seen driving down the road is plastic bags flapping in the wind caught in trees and bushes. They are everywhere, and it seems to me that we have become desensitized to their existence. I read once from store to home to trash, a plastic bag is used for about 20 minutes. And if it doesn't get recycled and ends up fluttering in the breeze, those plastic bags take 15 years to degrade on average.Other plastics like the newer "plant" bottles that claim to be biodegradable or photodegradable may take much longer to degrade than those companies selling these bottles would have us believe.According to the Air and Waste Association, biodegradable plastics made with the addition of starch may just simply disintegrate into smaller nondegradable pieces. They don't break down; they break up. Americans throw away 35 billion plastic bottles every year - that's 25,000,000 plastic bottles every hour.And when I think about plastic bottles, I think about aluminum cans. I guess because that's what we recycle most often at work.I can't imagine tossing aluminum can in the trash, but every year Americans throw away 55 billion aluminum cans where they will remain in landfills for the next 200 years or more.William Rathje, a professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, started the Garbage Project. Rathje, who was way ahead of his time, became famous for digging through landfills to find clues about consumer behavior.While there, his team found legible newspapers more than 15 years old, mummified yard waste and food, including 30-year-old hot dogs, indicating decomposition in landfills is a very slow process or it doesn't occur at all.Don't get me started on all the other "stuff" we throw out. That's a topic for another article, I guess.So, that leads me to ask … "What's in your trash can?"