Managing waste require hierarchy.
Managing waste with the ‘3Rs’.
Managing waste hierarchy can start with the ‘3 Rs’: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Waste management strategies are classified according to their desirability regarding waste minimisation. The waste hierarchy remains the cornerstone of most waste minimisation strategies.
The waste hierarchy, represented as a pyramid, aims to extract the maximum practical benefits from products and generate the minimum amount of waste. The basic premise is that policy should take action first and prevent waste generation. The next step or preferred action is to reduce waste generation, particularly by reusing.
The next step is recycling, which would include composting. Following this step is material recovery and waste-to-energy. Energy can be recovered from landfills and combustion processes at this hierarchy level. The final action is disposal in landfills or through incineration without energy recovery. This last step is the final resort for waste that has not been prevented, diverted, or recovered.
The waste hierarchy represents the progression of a product or material through the sequential stages of the pyramid of waste management. The hierarchy represents the latter parts of each product’s life cycle.
Making a start in managing waste.
Your community should start thinking about how it will implement a waste management program in the future. The community has two choices:
- Choose to do nothing in their community development program and suffer the consequences, or
- The community can make rules based on local wants and needs and implement the necessary training and waste management programs.
Australians have an excellent reputation for recycling. In the past few decades, recycling has gone mainstream, with a two or three-bin system now available for most people at home, at work, and in public.
How is your reputation in managing waste?
’Waste management’ means many things to many people, so you should create a hierarchy for your community.
Unfortunately, too many Australians want to own everything. Why not start swapping and borrowing items when needed, so you will not have to purchase so much? Share your tools and equipment, and plan to carpool when getting to work. Deliver what you no longer need to the local recycling depot (why not start one up if the community doesn’t have one), and purchase recycled items.
Business owners and non-profit organisations should leverage technologies to disruptively advance nearly every activity and supply chain function, weeding out unnecessary items. The payoff will be reduced costs, a renewed focus on customer satisfaction, improved efficiency, and more sustainability in outcomes with less risk.
Quotable Quotes
“Don’t forget to measure outcomes. Without a simple, shared scoreboard, people will determine how to measure their success”. Peter Sergeant
“The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries – a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man”. Gerald Durrell