Who's Talkin' Trash? A Case for Zero Waste

Is it possible to live in a world where there is no waste? Imagine it: a world where plastic grocery bags do not permeate household rubbish piles, water bottles and syringes do not end up on pristine beach shores, and six-ring can holders do not threaten the livelihood of our precious ocean creatures. Unfortunately, trash has come to be characterized as an inevitable and unpreventable part of our society. This modern notion begs to be challenged.

Aside from the visible litter that pervades our walkways and our exposé media outlets, the majority of modern America has the luxury of never seeing landfills. These waste dump sites are among the most forgotten aspects of American consumerist culture. We have the luxury of putting as much waste per week in our street side trash bins as we want, and then having the elusive “garbage man” drive a truck through our neighborhoods to retrieve all of it to take it away so we never have to look at it again. Our waste removal system is institutionally designed in such a way that it encourages people to waste as much as they want with no direct consequences. 

This structure has arisen due to multiple factors, not the least of which being the effort to support the immense material consumption and disposal on which our economy is founded. According to “The Story of Stuff,” the average lifetime of products from purchase to disposal is merely six months. Products are not built or valued for durability; rather, manufacturers intentionally develop products that will last the shortest time possible before breaking that the consumer still has enough faith in the product to purchase it again!

This disposable culture is incredibly harmful for a number of reasons. For one, many products, especially disposable ones, are manufactured using vast amounts of fossil fuels and producing equally as many dangerous greenhouse gas emissions. Then after a short-lived, disposable life, these products almost inexorably end up in landfills, which are the ultimate and proximate cause of many harmful environmental effects. Organic waste, that which biodegrades over time, decomposes in landfills to produce methane gas, a greenhouse gas that is up to twenty-three more times more potent that the infamous carbon dioxide. This means that methane’s potential to heat up the atmosphere and exacerbate the onset of climate change is multitudes higher than the best-known and most targeted greenhouse gas today. In this way, landfills are symbols of more than just waste, and typify the threat of global climate change both in their sheer existence and their function of incentivizing the consumerist status quo.

Obviously, landfills pose a serious hurdle in the pursuit of fostering a more environmentally sustainable world. So how do we go about tempering their impact on the environment? Leaders everywhere have attempted to address this issue through implementation of local recycling programs, municipal waste sites, and incineration of landfill waste, none of which have successfully reduced the harmful effects of landfills. In much the same way that abstinence is the only sure way to prevent pregnancy, so eradicating landfills altogether is the only way to guarantee that their negative consequences disappear. This does not mean that landfills will be gone and garbage that did go to designated waste sites will instead litter the streets. Rather, this means that the demand for landfills must be abolished in an effort to care for the planet in the most sustainable and carbon-neutral way possible. This powerful movement to diverge all waste away from landfills is called “Zero Waste.”

Eliminating the use of landfills involves dual factors: having alternate ways of disposing of materials through compost and recycle systems, and consuming fewer goods overall. Have both of these facets is instrumental in meeting the goal of a zero waste society. Both compost and recycle systems entail the reuse of resources in a productive way, instead of disposing of unwanted waste in a landfill or alternate trash facility. Recycling is the conversion of old materials like plastic and glass bottles or paper into new materials. Recycling is possible with a variety of different materials, but occurs in different manners. Most recyclables have to be sent to an industrial manufacturer to convert old materials into new items, but some recycling, like compost, can be completed by individuals. Compost is the processing of organic matter like food scraps, leaf litter, and manure into fertilizer that can go back into soil to improve its arability.

Any waste that cannot be diverted away from landfills as either recycling or compost symbolizes the inefficiency of a waste management system. The extreme inefficiency in the landfill-dependent American waste system stems the fact that consumption and waste structures constitute a very linear system, when there should be a closed system. This means that waste generated is not being diverted from landfills through compost and recycling:

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the cycle that materials go through today, from extraction of materials to eventual disposal. This system indicates the very linear nature of current waste management systems, from extraction and manufacture, to use, to discard. This system is intrinsically unsustainable, as it promotes the constant processing of new raw materials, including non-renewable resources like metals. If these materials do not get reused or recycled, they will eventually run out and leave us with nothing else to consume, even for necessities.

This chart also concisely outlines the three different stages of waste management, from prevention, to recovery, to disposal. It is clear from this diagram that the vast majority of raw materials that go into manufacturing products (left-hand side of the diagram) end up in landfills upon disposal (far right-hand side of the diagram), even with the existence of strong recycling and compost systems. These closed-loop cycles within the waste prevention and recovery stages clearly are not sufficient alone to minimize waste to landfills; they do, however, show the potential for advancement toward a zero waste vision. Figure 2 in an example of this vision:

Figure 2

Figure 2 depicts a closed-loop system that successfully generates less waste overall than the linear system in Figure 1. In this model, there is no waste going to disposal, and no pollutants being generated. The methods depicted in this diagram are very different than those in Figure 1, and are very interesting in terms of zero waste. For one, this model only includes two stages of waste management, prevention and recovery, so no landfill is necessary at all. This system greatly utilizes principles of reusing and recycling materials much more than the linear model. The tenets outlined in the bottom of the diagram, Rethink, Redesign, Reduce, and Repair, are very useful supplemental values to the modern mantra of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” These other action words emphasize the importance of preventing waste in the first place so that methods of disposal do not have to direct the entire waste management system.

To emphasize the prevention side of this diagram even more, perhaps the most poignant aspect of this chart is that the extraction of raw materials is multitudes smaller than in Figure 1. Because materials that have already been manufactured are being rethought, redesigned, reduced, and repaired, there is much less demand for new raw materials. This value is perhaps the most important aspect of waste prevention and progressing toward a zero waste reality: extracting less materials means producing less new materials, which leads to disposing of less waste in the end.

Though this seems like a relatively simple objective, there are many players that are responsible for working toward zero waste. The first is the government that provides the infrastructure for the waste management system. If a system is institutionally designed in the context of zero waste, then it will be more successful at implementing a zero waste production and consumption model. Also, governments can institute policies that dictate the proper creation and management of waste that incentivizes people to stop wasting so much.

The second key player in all of this is the producer of the goods that are bought and sold. Producers are the ones responsible for both extracting the raw materials and constructing the makeup of their products, which determines if they are recyclable or compostable. For example, a food company determines if it wants its packaging to be flimsy plastic that must go into the landfill or rigid plastic that can be recycled.

Producers are a very important player in the waste management system, but they operate on an economic system of supply and demand. If we the consumers demand their products, then the producers will extract more resources to meet the necessary supply. That is why it is crucial that individual consumers demand and abide by the principles of zero waste. To see this vision become a reality, they must band together to consume less, demand that producers manufacture less waste, and advocate for governments to put the necessary structures in place to meet these goals.

Reducing waste is important in a world that is compromised by environmental issues. It is time that we reinstate a system of reduced waste and greater efficiency. We need to talk back the economy with the mantra that no one likes trash talkers! We talk compost. We talk reduction. We talk redesign a world suited to a waste-free system. We talk saving the planet for future generations. We don’t talk trash.