The average person generates 4.3 pounds of waste per day. This is 1.6 pounds more than most produced back in 1960. Where does it all go? Approximately 55% of 220 million tons of waste generated each year in the United States ends up in one of the over 3,500 landfills. The average American throws away 4.5 pounds of trash a day.

To give you an idea of how much trash we generate here in the United States, imagine a hole the size of a football field, including the end zones. If we bury all of the trash we produce in just one year, that hole would be 100 miles deep.

 
1/3 of the waste generated in America is packaging.

I bet you’ve never thought about laundry detergent caps.  I hadn’t either until I found all of these in the basement of one suburban American home.  I was pretty blown away so I decided to get to the bottom of this.  I found that the average American family uses 13 bottles of detergent per year. 

There are 115 million households in America, which means that’s nearly 1.5 billion caps!  End to end one years worth of Americas caps could line the equator nearly three times!  That’s just the caps though.  Imagine how much space all of the bottles would take up!

I used to make plastic bottles for a living and I was good at it.  I remember one of my supervisors saying whats the big deal were only making garbage and that hit me in the gut.  At that point I didn’t even know but like 5 years later I came up with the idea of reusing these bottles instead of recycling or throwing them away.  Thus GF2 was born.

It was a Sunday morning and it was Aug. 23 at 7:19 am 2009 and it popped in my head so I sat up in bed and said that’s it, that’s it.  My wife was startled and asked what is it?  I ran down stairs, grabbed a pad and started sketching. That’s where my green future filler came from.

- Martin Burrows, Inventor