Singapore is a tiny country. It's this big and it has no space for trash.
So here is how they got rid of it.
First, they collect the entire country's trash from here, here, and here,
and drive it to this big building to burn it.
Inside this incineration plant, there is a fire that burns 24 hours, 7 days a week,
365 days a year, and this 1000 Celsius degrees fire eats the trash away,
and generates heat and energy to light up thousands of homes.
From our incineration process, we harness the heat to generate electricity.
But here's the crazy part. This fire behind me doesn't even hurt the environment.
When you burn trash, it generates toxic smoke like this one.
And these guys filter out the smoke in a complicated process to make it so clean,
cleaner than the air around you.
So this chimney at an incineration plant emits clean air.
The air come up from the chimney is smaller than one micron, which is very, very clean.
By now, 90% of the trash disappears in a couple of hours, and the remaining 10% turns to ash.
This ash, just like the smoke, is toxic.
They take it and ship it far away to a man-made island,
where they dump all of it into a special water that doesn't touch the ocean water.
And there, ash stays underwater forever, hidden from everyone.
This process is so clean, the corals are still alive, the jungles are still green,
and the animals are still around at that island.
In other words, Singapore collects trash, burns it, creates electricity, filters out the smoke,
hides the ashes underwater, and makes this trash bag disappear in one day instead of 500 years.
If every country could handle your trash and mine the same way Singapore does,
then we would have a much cleaner world.
A world where this snack bag doesn't exist for more than one day.