Waste is a by-product of nearly every activity on Earth, representing tremendous “waste” of a variety of resources, everything from natural raw materials, to the energy and water required to produce products. Our neglect in controlling or eliminating waste adds unnecessary cost to products providing no useful benefit. When we consider the costs of waste disposal and the related impact on the environment, our total cost of ownership of products is greatly increased. However, as they say, “What is waste for one is treasure for another.”
Getting to zero waste requires employing two strategies: opportunities to reuse or repurpose materials at the end of their useful life and avoiding the acquisition of materials that cannot be reused. Many efforts are being made in this regard on many fronts, but we will limit our discussion here to only those that we have the ability to influence in our daily lives. Some of these require us to use our purchasing power to influence the manufacturing marketplace, while others depend upon the choices we make to shift the disposal streams.
Waste Beyond the Household
Many municipalities are working toward zero waste plans for their communities. This process requires thorough examination of the composition of the trash that gets dumped into landfills. It has to be traced back to its various sources, and alternatives to disposal researched for each source for each type of material. All of the various contributors, from office buildings to restaurants and various other types of business and industrial activities, to apartment complexes and private homes, each represent their own set of challenges and require uniquely different approaches. But the lessons learned can be shared and offer benefit across market segments. This chapter examines how to embrace the right strategies so that you do not invest in materials and products that will have little reuse value or may even represent liabilities in the future.
To start, we’ll briefly view opportunities outside of the household arena so that we can realize how those affect our lives and our ability to reduce our own waste. Let’s dig through a few dumpsters from commercial, industrial and retail establishments and see what kinds of waste are found and what else might be done to divert them to some other purpose. Since all of these facilities are workplaces, all the dumpsters will contain typical lunch and break room waste, including aluminum cans, glass bottles, paper, cardboard and plastic products and, of course, food waste. Many businesses already furnish employees with recycling opportunities for paper, plastic, glass and aluminum. Many municipal trash services now have separate facilities for managing and reselling those reusable materials. This has, in many instances, proven to be a new revenue stream for cities, making their efforts more worthwhile. This has also resulted in many of the same recycling opportunities being offered to residential waste customers, providing us with an easy means of recycling these same products from our own homes.
Food and Waste
Expanding the recycling opportunities for food-related waste is on the agenda of many zero waste plans. New compostable food packaging and single-use eating and drinking containers and utensils are available, and over time, should replace those that are not. This new market has spilled over to the food packaging products available for purchase in our local grocery markets.
But the biggest opportunity here has to do with the food scraps themselves. The decomposition of food and other organic waste produces methane emissions (a potent greenhouse gas) from landfill facilities. This creates a problem for the atmosphere, and is a waste of good organic materials. Efforts are being made to provide managed diversion of this waste stream from business establishments to a facility that can use it, along with grass clippings, leaves and other decaying organic matter, to produce quality compost to be used to rebuild depleted soils. This effort will significantly impact the restaurant and fresh produce retail industries, capturing vast volumes of organic waste and redirecting it to produce organic fertilizer to grow more food crops. Backyard composting efforts are being piloted in many cities, again providing us with means to divert our own organic waste streams.
Commercial Waste
The first step in reducing commercial waste is to avoid generating it to begin with Many types of communications that were historically in printed form are now available electronically, so that method should be utilized as much as possible to reduce the volume of paper waste created. Many office buildings are installing hand dryers, to replace paper products used in restrooms and lunchrooms. Most commercial, office and industrial paper is shredded, often by an independent service provider that is also tasked with its disposal. Many office buildings and commercial establishments now manage recycling dumpsters, especially for cardboard shipping boxes. Again this has helped to create the market for household recycling service pickup of both paper and cardboard products. Those that cannot be recycled should be diverted to our backyard compost bins.
Packing materials are also reusable or recyclable, and efforts to divert them to businesses that specialize in providing shipping services are well appreciated. There is still a need to find reuse or recycling opportunities for plastic package wrapping, although alternative materials are now available that are compostable, so eventually these will also go into the organic recycling stream. These are currently available from retail outlets online, but you should start seeing them soon on your market shelves.
Manufacturers of office equipment supplies typically take back spent cartridges and refill them for resale. Office machines and electronics are recyclable, with many manufacturers now taking back, refurbishing and reselling products. These opportunities exist for home office equipment and supplies as well. We should be looking for manufacturers making efforts to redesign electronics to make it easier to upgrade to newer technologies without having to completely replace systems.
Industrial Waste
As mentioned in this article, more manufacturers are adopting sustainable practices, including improved management of their facilities. Some have achieved certification for environmental stewardship, and have made efforts to reduce and recycle waste generated by their processes. This may include recycling raw materials into new products, reuse of water resources onsite or use of methane gas resulting from operations as a fuel source, to generate electricity for operations. We should support those efforts by watching for the ISO 14001 label on packaging of products.
More and more manufacturers are also analyzing their product lines and making efforts toward green alternatives. This includes a review of raw materials used, recognizing the impacts on workers who handle and install the materials in the field and looking to the future in terms of life cycle impacts. As discussed, many manufacturers now realize that their business practices and products are under public scrutiny and that these factors affect their long-term profitability and, therefore, survival in the marketplace. Many have also seen diminishing natural resource availability impacting their product pricing, lowering market share. These factors support efforts to reduce waste and conserve resources to keep products affordable. We should look for products made by companies who are making stewardship efforts known (e.g., free trade or FSC-certified), that are made with recycled content and that provide opportunities for us to recycle materials back so that we can support their efforts.
Hazardous Waste
Efforts made since the 1970s by the Environmental Protection Agency have resulted in the reduction and better management of toxic waste disposal sites. We have continued to improve our own efforts to properly dispose of the consumer products that we purchase that fall into this category, as well as to contribute to the effort to clean up historic disposal sites (i.e., brownfields) for redevelopment.
However, we have at the same time developed new technologies that may lead to future problems from new sources. As a society, we continue to tolerate new unproven methods, especially if they provide us with cheaper resources that are in mass demand. As mentioned in this article, many thousands of chemical substances have been created over the last hundred or so years but only a small percentage of these have ever even been tested for toxicity. We have no idea what impact they have on the health of our families or what disposal of the products made from these chemicals does to the environment. Until we demand more accountability on the part of manufacturers, we continue to be exposed to products both through using them and in their impact on the environment through unregulated disposal. We are all subject to finding out the consequences too late. This is why it is increasingly important that we investigate the chemical composition of all the products that we purchase, making wiser purchasing and disposal decisions.
