Managing Waste

 

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It's an unfortunate fact of life that we humans are generating an ever-increasing amount of waste. In the past 35 years, the amount of solid waste generated, on average, by each man, woman, and child in the U.S. has risen to 4.4 pounds a day from 2.7 pounds a day, according to the EPA. Biocycle magazine, an industry trade publication, reports that the U.S. generated 409 million tons of non-hazardous waste in 2001, up from 247 million tons just 11 years earlier.

Waste management is a dirty business involving different methods of disposal, depending upon whether the waste is hazardous or non-hazardous; residential or industrial; or solid, liquid, or gas. Non-hazardous waste can be dumped into a landfill, it can be incinerated, or it can be buried. Hazardous waste disposal, on the other hand, is an industry unto itself.

Some of our waste can be recycled. The cost of municipal waste disposal, to take one example, is estimated to be $100 per ton, according to the EPA. By some estimates, 32 percent of municipal waste is recycled, a promising number that has been climbing in recent years as more and more municipalities implement recycling programs. Even so, the EPA has estimated that only about 2 percent of all waste generated is municipal waste. Thus, despite all the best-intentioned efforts to promote recycling, municipal programs aren't even touching 98 percent of the waste we generate, which includes industrial waste, hospital waste, construction waste, and nuclear waste.

The truth is that we really don't know the full scope of the waste we generate and what happens to it. What we do know, however, is that the costs associated with waste disposal, not even including factors such as the cost to the environment, are high and are getting higher every year.

Recycling is one of the simplest yet most effective options for helping to offset the costs. Although implementing a recycling program isn't difficult, it does require discipline. Recycling, however, attacks the problem only after it has occurred. An even better approach, which can be used in conjunction with recycling, is to reduce the amount of waste generated. To learn more, take a look at either of the following:

• Reducing waste
• Recycling