Incinerators and landfills are both attempts to answer the question, “what do we do with waste?” Over the last century, governments have invested billions of dollars in increasingly sophisticated technologies in the vain hope of making waste disappear. Yet neither incinerators nor landfills truly dispose of waste; each creates significant, hazardous byproducts and generates additional waste streams that require further management. This is because waste, like all matter, can never truly be destroyed. The current paradigm of waste management attempts to impose a linear production model on a cyclical ecosystem.
In the linear model of the human economy, materials are first extracted from nature, then processed into goods, then consumed, and finally discarded. The challenge, therefore, is not merely to find a new method of dealing with waste, but to completely change the manner in which materials flow through human society. At the same time, human discards must be fed back into the economy in ways that reduce the pressure on natural resources. At that point, they are no longer wastes, but resources.
Alternative approaches must begin by questioning the fundamental assumptions of traditional waste management. These include the ever increasing quantity of waste generated, the mixing of disparate materials in the waste stream, and failure of much industrial design to take wastes properly into account. Waste generation is often projected to increase without limit for the foreseeable future. But it should be obvious that waste – and therefore resource consumption – cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet.
Waste management must therefore be replaced by materials management: creating a closed loop economy that neither generates significant wastes nor consumes resources beyond their replacement rate. In order to achieve this closed-loop economy, true waste (material that is of no use and must be disposed) must be differentiated from discards: materials that are of no further use to their present owner but are still a resource to be fed back into the economy. This means an end to the mixed waste stream. When discards are mixed, they become useless and appear to require large-scale disposal technologies to manage them.
Currently, waste management is treated as wholly unrelated to an economy’s production and consumption patterns. Governments collect and manage most waste while private firms and consumers produce it. As a result, private businesses shift a significant portion of their costs onto society as a whole by not taking responsibility for their waste streams and by manufacturing products that cannot readily be recycled. Even when producers do have responsibility for their wastes, such as process wastes from a factory, they rarely pay the full cost of managing them. Incineration and landfilling merely transfer the problem to other populations and future generations. Large-scale industrial redesign is needed to eliminate wastes that result from production and change products so that they may be recycled.
Ultimately, an effective program for dealing with waste is more about materials management than about technology. Although the details vary considerably, three principles are the key to solving the waste problem: prevention / minimization, waste stream segregation and industrial redesign.
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1. What are the traditional ways of waste disposal? 2. Why are incinerators and landfills harmful to the environment? 3. What is meant by a linear production model? 4. What is a true waste? 5. What is needed to eliminate wastes? 7. What are the key principles to solve the waste problem? 8. Are you ready to sort your wastes at home?
To Lesson 30
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