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Waste is threathening to choke our planet. But it could help save megawatts of energy, tons of
CO2, and valuable resources, if used properly.
There is a new continent and it is bigger than the United States. Its a vast expanse of plastic
debris floating on the Pacific Ocean. The sight of hundreds of kilometers of waste is disgusting,
yet plastics aren’t even the worst consequence of a culture of excess and wastefulness.
More than a billion people worldwide go hungry, while the average household in Europe and the
United States throws away one third of all food bought. Food worth more than 48 billion dollars
is thrown away in the U.S. every year.
“If we can get people to consume less, buy less, then that is going to have environmental benefits
all along the production chain,” says Mike Webster of Waste Watch, an NGO based in the UK.
Wasting less food would cut down on the consumption of water, fertilizers, and pesticides. Less
waste would also mean smaller landfills. In the U.S. and Europe, about half of all municipal
waste is landfilled, in the developing world as much as 80 percent.
Worldwide, the annual production of municipal solid waste had grown to a staggering 2.02
billion tons by 2006, according to the latest Global Waste Management Market Assessment
report. In 2011, the authors expect to see a rise to 2.8 billion tons. And food makes up a big
chunk of this.
A criminal waste
These leftovers would be more than enough to feed 1.5 billion undernourished people, calculates
Tristram Stuart, author of the book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal. “Since food
supply has become a global phenomenon,” Stuart writes, “putting food in the bin really is
equivalent to taking it off the world market and out of the mouths of the starving.”
Picture Gallery (click on the image to start)
See the world’s biggest garbage dump in the Pacific Ocean
But it is not just a humanitarian problem. Our climate suffers as well. Properly composted, food
waste could turn into fertile soil. Trapped in a landfill, however, it rots without oxygen, emitting
methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more powerful than CO2. Landfills worldwide release an
estimated 20 to 60 million tons of methane per year, according to a report co-authored by the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
More and more landfills trap this gas to produce electricity. German landfills alone produce
methane with an energy content of some 50 billion kilowatt hours, enough to replace two nuclear
power plants. Using it as fuel would take care of the methane, although gas power plants still
emit a lot of CO2.
Waste prevention is the key, says Mike Webster. The tools have been around for centuries:
composting waste, cooking with leftovers, planning meals. It’s a return to values once cherished
by older generations. “We hope that we can get people to reassess their values in a broader
sense,” he says. “Younger generations seem to be rediscovering this waste-not, want-not
approach.”
The biggest dent in waste, however, does not come from raised awareness, but from economic
distress. After decades of steady growth, the recession reduced domestic waste arising in the UK
by ten percent. Mike Webster fears that this could only be temporary relief.
Electronic Waste
One of the things that make Webster and other experts worry is the rapid growth of electronic
waste. E-waste makes up 5 percent of all waste worldwide, nearly the same amount as all plastic
packaging, estimates Greenpeace.
E-waste, however, is a lot more dangerous than plastics. In the United States, an estimated 70
percent of all heavy metals in landfills come from discarded e-waste, according to figures from
the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. And with up to 80 percent of old computers being exported
to places like China or Vietnam, the problem is even worse in the developing world.
“There is a stream of illegal e-waste going to these countries,” says Paul de Jong, director of the
Dutch Ewaste Foundation. Dismantling electronic waste is fairly safe and efficient in Europe and
North America, but many countries in Africa and Asia lack the necessary facilities.
The best way would be to process it in a controlled environment with the right machinery and a
smelter,” says de Jong. The process, he adds, is expensive but profitable because it allows
extracting valuable materials like copper, gold, or even the scarce Beryllium.
In poor countries things work differently. When dismantling old computer monitors, electronic
parts are often the only piece of interest for recyclers. “The glass and the plastic are often just
dumped somewhere,” de Jong explains, “but the plastic has been treated with chemicals to make
it inflammable and the CRT glass contains phosphor on the inside, which is not very healthy.”
Copper, a valuable metal often used in cables, also attracts unhealthy practices. In Europe or the
U.S., special machinery strips the plastic protecting sleeve from the copper core. African
recyclers simply set the cables on fire to burn the plastic sleeve. This reduces the amount of
copper extracted and produces toxic fumes.
Consumerism has spawned a whole range of products with “inbuilt obsolescence”, as Mike
Webster puts it. The lifespan of computers in developed countries, for example, has dropped
from six years in 1997 to just two years in 2005.
Related Articles
• Waste Watch: A New View of Junk
• House Cleaning: How Allianz Cuts Waste
• Rag Pickers: Saving India from Waste
If we move away from this throw-away society, we can even get rid of that new continent,
ponders Captain Charles Moore, the not-so-proud discoverer of the Pacific Garbage Patch.
“Maybe if we could cut the plastic we put into the oceans to zero it could make sense to clean up
what’s left.“
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Comments
SHREERAM KC 2010-08-28 13:48:32
waste reduce in zero by,recycle,compost fertilizer,
I am working in this field and i am new please help for ahead.
• more
Ragu Ragu 2010-07-14 12:05:04
waste recycling
i am working in waste recycling management sector,could forward any recent updates to my
mail
• more
latha annam 2010-04-17 03:16:59
e waste recycling management
I am interested in starting up a e waste recycling unit in india.Could forward any latest info
regading this.I will very thankful. Regards,latha.
• more
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Waste Management
Waste Management is the term that refers to the collection, processing, recycling, transport, and
monitoring of waste products. The waste products means the various materials produced by
human activity and is undertaken for reducing their effect on health, environment or aesthetics.
Another application of the waste management is to recover the various resources from it. It
involves the management of solid, liquid, and gaseous wastes. Each type of waste requires a
different methods and fields of expertise. The practices of waste management differ from
developed and developing nations. In fact, there is difference in methods used in the urban and
rural areas, and also for industrial or
residential producers. It is the
responsibility of local government
authorities to manage non-hazardous
residential and institutional waste in
metro areas. On other hand the
management for non-hazardous
commercial and industrial waste is
done by the generator.
There are various methods of waste
disposal including integrated waste
management, Plasma gasification, Landfill, Supercritical water decomposition and Incineration.
There are lots of concepts about waste management which differ in their usage as per the varying
regions or countries. Some of the widely used concepts include Waste hierarchy, Extended
producer responsibility and Polluter pays principle. The waste hierarchy points to the “reduce,
reuse and recycle” that classify waste management strategies as per their effectiveness in regards
to waste minimization. The waste hierarchy is the cornerstone of majority of waste minimization
strategies. It focuses on taking out the maximum practical advantages from products and
generating least amount of waste.
The Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a strategy that is intended for the integration of
all costs related with products across their life cycles into the market price of the product. The
Polluter Pays Principle suggests that in case of waste leading to any impact on the environment,
the polluting party is held responsible and it needs to pays for it. The waste management refers to
the need for a waste producer to pay for proper waste disposal.
Comments are closed.
Waste management
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Waste management (disambiguation).
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Methods of disposal
○ 1.1 Integrated waste management
○ 1.2 Plasma gasification
○ 1.3 Landfill
○ 1.4 Incineration
• 2 Recycling
• 3 Sustainability
○ 3.1 Biological reprocessing
• 4 Waste handling and transport
• 5 Technologies
• 6 Waste management concepts
• 7 Education and awareness
• 8 See also
• 9 References
• 10 External links
[edit] Landfill
Main article: Landfill
[edit] Technologies
Traditionally the waste management industry has been slow to adopt new technologies such as
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, GPS and integrated software packages which enable
better quality data to be collected without the use of estimation or manual data entry.
• Technologies like RFID tags are now being used to collect data on
presentation rates for curb-side pick-ups which is useful when examining the
usage of recycling bins or similar.
• Benefits of GPS tracking is particularly evident when considering the
efficiency of ad hoc pick-ups (like skip bins or dumpsters) where the
collection is done on a consumer request basis.
• Integrated software packages are useful in aggregating this data for use in
optimisation of operations for waste collection operations.
• Rear vision cameras are commonly used for OH&S reasons and video
recording devices are becoming more widely used, particularly concerning
residential services and contaminations of the waste stream.
[edit] References
1. ^ "What is Waste Management?". 2009.
http://www.wanless.com.au/what_is_waste_management.html.
2. ^ Alliance Federated Energy | What Is Plasma Gasification
3. ^ Alliance Federated Energy | Why Plasma Gasification
4. ^ Life Cycle Environmental Assessment of Municipal Solid Waste to Energy
Technologies
5. ^ Sorting through garbage for gold, retrieved 2009-11-24
6. ^ Television review: 'Trash Inc.', Susan Carpenter, Los Angeles Times, 29
September 2010