More than anything else Zero Waste is a new direction. We have to move from the back end of waste disposal to the front end of resource management and better industrial design.
The Fourth R
Most people are familiar with the 3R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) but it is the Fourth R of Responsibility, which holds the key to sustainability. We need individual, community, industrial, professional and political responsibilities. We need to integrate zero waste strategists with farmers, educators, economists, industrial workers, architects, community developers, and social activists.
Industrial responsibility at the front end
There are three important developments industry needs to pursue:
1) Design for Sustainability,
2) Clean Production and
3) Extended Producer Responsibility.
Design for Sustainability
Right from the outset Industry needs to incorporate this new ethic. It is not enough that industry can sell its products to the present, it must design its products so that the object, or at least its constituent materials, can easily be shared with the future.
Clean Production
Another important challenge in sustainable design is to eliminate as much as possible the use of toxic elements and compounds in manufacture. This includes toxic metals like lead, cadmium and mercury (which have no known biological use) as well as compounds containing the problematic elements chlorine, bromine and fluorine.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)
Manuf acturers and retailers can anticipate new laws that will force them to take back their products and packaging after the customer has finished with them. Some manufacturers are well ahead of the game and have found that by recovering and reusing either the parts or the materials in their products, that they can save money, both on disposal and production costs. A very good example is the Xerox Corporation in Europe. They are using the same trucks that take their machines to 16 different countries, to collect old machines. These are taken to huge warehouses in Venray, Netherlands, where the machines are stripped down. The company is recovering 95% of the material either as reusable parts or recyclable materials. This saved Xerox $76 million in the year 2000.
Community Responsibility at the back end
Community Responsibility begins with source separation and door-to-door collection systems. Basically, in all systems one container is used for the organic fraction (especially kitchen waste), one or more for the recyclables and a third for the residuals.
The Organics
It is the organic fraction which causes the odours when left around in cities like Naples. The organic fraction also causes methane and leachate generation in landfills. But perhaps the most important reason that we need to collect clean organic waste is that it is needed by farmers to replenish their soils of depleted nutrients. Compost also has a distinct advantage over incineration of not only reducing the global warming involved in the production of synthetic fertilizers but also sequestering the carbon in wood and other cellulosic fibers thereby delaying the release of global warming carbon dioxide. With incineration, the conversion of cellulose and other organic material to carbon dioxide is immediate. In San Fra ncisco, the kitchen and other organic waste is sent to a large composting plant located approximately 100 km from the city. The site is surrounded by farmland and local farmers use the compost to produce fruit, vegetables and wine, which is sent back to San Francisco. Instead of exporting their mixed waste to landfills and incinerators located in rural areas, which causes so much intense opposition from citizens and farmers, municipal decision makers should work with farmers to produce together (i.e. co-composting the organic fraction from the municipal discard stream with the agricultural waste from farming) a compost product that everyone can live with and benefit from.
In Italy, it was the need to generate clean organics which drove the development of porta-a-porta (door to door) collection systems. The large drop off containers traditionally used in Italy for both sorted and unsorted materials do not get a clean enough product for agricultural use. Zurich, Switzerland, which has a very dense housing situation, has encouraged “community composting”. In this program a number of households (ranging from 3-200) share the responsibility of running a simple compost system. Currently the city boasts over 1000 community composting plots, which in total are taking care of 50% of the city’s household organic waste.
The Recyclables
The recyclable materials are destined to go to Material Recovery Facilities (or MRFs) of which there are hundreds of successful examples around the world. Their function is to separate the paper, cardboard, glass, metals and plastic and prepare them to meet the specifications of the industries, which will use these secondary materials to manufacture new products. Some of these plants are built to handle a single stream of mixed recyclables (e.g. Perth, Australia) and others deal with two streams: paper products in one stream and bottles, cans etc in the other (e.g. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada).
Because of their high employment demands and the economy of scale, these plants are best located in large cities, which are also usually more conveniently located to industries which can use the secondary materials. This sets up an ideal partnership between urban and rural areas. The cities should export their organics to the rural areas and the rural areas shou ld transfer their recyclables to the cities.
The Residuals
The separation of clean organics and marketable recyclables takes us closer to a sustainable future,but the residuals do not.
Local and National Waste Reduction Initiatives
There are many unnecessary items especially packaging – which have entered our lives. As these pile up in landfills more and more governments and private enterprises are taking steps to reduce their use and production.
Reuse, Repair and Retraining Centers
Another important reduction strategy is to encourage the establishment of reuse, repair and retraining facilities. There are many successful examples of such operations running either for profit or as non-profit entities. An example of the former is Urban Ore in Berkeley, California. Run by Dr. Dan Knapp, a retired sociology professor and his wife Mary Lou Derventer. This operation has been running for over 30 years. The company accepts anything reusable and lays out the goods like a department store. They will pay for valuable items but more often than not people are only to happy to see their second hand appliances and furniture used again and not simply crushed and sent to a landfill or burned in an incinerator. A very profitable part of this operation is the section set aside for building materials (timber, bricks, bathroom fittings, doors and windows etc) which come from deconstruction or renovation of old buildings. More and more builders are dropping of their recovered materials while they are picking up reusable items for new projects.
These operations work so well because reusable items are valuable. Recyclables are high volume, low value; reusables are low volume, high value.
6840kg waste on rail tracks!
A student of IIM- Ahmedabad in a study has found that nearly 6840kg of solid waste is being generated every day in the three railway stations (Maninagar, Kalupur and Sabarmati) of Ahmedabad. The study concluded that lack of enough dustbins inside the rail compartments has resulted in people throwing garbage on the railway tracks. It has put forward 86 suggestions, including placing of dustbins in coaches, collecting manual garbage every five to six hours, emptying dustbins regularly and on-board cleaning system. The study also suggests supplies of filtered water in trains which could reduce the use of bottled water, replacing aluminum foil packages in pantry cars with steel cutleries and banning materials like Tetrapak in trains as they are difficult to recycle.
A major chunk, about 40%, of the waste generated at the railway stations is plastic matter which can be recycled and reused. Other sources of waste are paper, organic waste, aluminum foil, rubber, leather and clothes.
Important message from the community to the industry “if we can’t reuse it, recycle it or compost it, you shouldn’t be making it and we shouldn’t be buying it.”
Deconstruction
Going hand in hand with reuse and repair operation is the deconstruction as opposed to demolition – of old buildings. Deconstruction takes longer but it yields more employment and valuable materials. In some cases recovered materials like doors and windows can be reused as they are, in other cases the materials (such as lumber) can be used to make new items like furniture.
Finally, after removing the recyclables and compostables, maximizing waste reduction initiatives and stimulating the reuse and repair of objects and deconstruction, we are left with the residual fraction. Today this fraction is either sent to a landfill or an incinerator, but in the zero waste strategy it is not. But before we deal with that, there is still one more step we can take to minimize the residual fraction – the pay by bag system.
Pay by bag systems
The idea here is to encourage citizens to maximize the diversion possibilities, by penalizing the production of residuals. Typically the recyclables, compostables are picked up for free, or at a flat rate (sometimes absorbed in local taxes) but an extra charge is applied to the residuals. This can be done in several ways: in some communities the residuals are weighed, in others stickers are purchased to place on each bag placed on the kurb, or special plastic bags have to be purchased. This one simple fiscal step has led to significant reductions in many jurisdictions.
The Residual Separation and Research Facilities
The residual fraction is the key difference between waste disposal (landfills and incinerators) and the zero waste strategy. The former attempts to make the residuals disappear, the latter needs to keep them very visible. The residual fraction represents our non-sustainable mistakes, either through citizens’ poor purchasing decisions or through poor industrial design. We need these residuals kept visible if we are to move towards a sustainable society. We need to study our mistakes. Thus in the Zero Waste strategy, the residuals need to be sent to a residual separation and research facility and not directly to a landfill.
Residual Separation
In Nova Scotia, the bags containing the residuals are not sent directly to a landfill but to a building located in front of the landfill. On arrival the bags are opened and the contents tipped onto conveyor belts, where well-protected and trained personnel pull out bulky items, more recyclables and more toxics. The dirty and untouched dirty organic fraction reaches the end of the conveyor belts. It is then shredded and biologically stabilized either by a second composting operation, in the case of Nova Scotia, or an anaerobic digestion system in other facilities. The point of this process is not to produce a product for sale (it is contaminated) but rather to ensure that much of the organic degradation occurs above ground in a controllable fashion before it takes place underground in an uncontrollable fashion.
However, there is more we need to do in a Zero Waste program than landfilling this nontoxic material. We need to carefully observe and study the currently non-recyclable fraction left in the residuals. This gives us our first opportunity to integrate zero waste with the educational system.
The Residual Screening and Research Facility
We need to build a research center at the Residual Screening facility. Ideally, this would be an annex of the local university or technical college. In this research center Professors and students with various interests in a sustainable future (industrial design, ethical advertising, urban and community development, economics, environmental management and global degradation) could study the non-sustainable mistakes of today’s society and propose future solutions. The simple but very important message from the community to industry: “if we can’t reuse it, recycle it or compost it, you shouldn’t be making it and we shouldn’t be buying it. We need better industrial design for the 21st Century.”
The attraction of Zero Waste as a tool to advance towards sustainability is that every human being is involved with the problem, every day. Every day we make waste we are part of a non-sustainable way of living on the planet and every day we “unmake waste” by separating our discarded materials, and by avoiding unnecessary products and packaging, we are part of a sustainable way of living on the planet.
Moreover, the Zero Waste movement can be linked to the other demands of a sustainable future. Waste is too important to be left to “waste experts.” We need to integrate those working on this issue with many other sectors in society. It is easy to see how this can be done: composting can be linked to sustainable agriculture; anaerobic digestion can be linked to sustainable energy; deconstruction can be linked to green architecture; the residual screening and research facilities are clearly linked to education and better industrial design; the reuse and repair centers can be linked to community development and the whole program can be linked to sustainable economic development and job creation.
Solving the waste problem is not going to be easy. The three alternatives of incineration, mega-landfilling and the Zero Waste strategy, all present their own set of problems. However, the difference with the Zero Waste approach is that it takes us in the right direction. Thus it makes far more sense to struggle to make this approach work because it is the only one which takes us towards a sustainable future.
Dr Paul ConnettDr Paul Connett’s essay on “Zero Waste for Sustainability” was published as a chapter
in a book in Italy in 2009. In 2010 he made presentation on the subject to the UN
Commission and the agriculture committee of the European Parliament.