Waste Reduction & Hazardous Material Management: Composting, Detox & Treaties, Slides of Ecology and Environment

Download Waste Reduction & Hazardous Material Management: Composting, Detox & Treaties and more Slides Ecology and Environment in PDF only on Docsity!

Solid and Hazardous Waste

Chapter 16

We throw away huge amounts of useful things

and hazardous materials

• No waste in natural world because wastes of one

organism become nutrients for others as a natural

recycling of nutrients occurs.

• Modern humans produce huge amounts of waste that

go unused and pollute.

• Solid waste —any unwanted or discarded material we

produce that is not a liquid or a gas.

• Industrial solid waste produced by mines, agriculture, and industries that supply people with goods and services.
• Municipal solid waste (MSW), consisting of the combined solid waste produced by homes and workplaces.

We throw away huge amounts of useful things

and hazardous materials

• Classes of hazardous wastes are:
  • Organic compounds
    • Various solvents, pesticides, PCBs, and dioxins.
  • Nondegradable toxic heavy metals
    • Lead, mercury, and arsenic.
  • Highly radioactive waste produced by nuclear

power plants and nuclear weapons facilities.

Composting is a form of recycling that mimics

nature’s recycling of nutrients

• Involves using decomposer bacteria to recycle yard trimmings, food scraps, and other organic wastes.
• The resulting organic material can be added to soil to supply plant nutrients, slow soil erosion, retain water, and improve crop yields.
• Homeowners can compost such wastes in simple backyard containers.
• Some cities in Canada and in many European Union countries collect and compost more than 85% of their biodegradable wastes in centralized community facilities.
• In the US, about 3,000 municipal composting programs recycle about 60% of the yard wastes.

International treaties have reduced

hazardous waste

• For decades, some more-developed countries had

been shipping hazardous wastes to less-developed

countries.

• Since 1992, international treaty known as the Basel

Convention has banned participating countries from

shipping hazardous waste to or through other

countries without their permission.

• In 1995, the treaty was amended to outlaw all transfers of hazardous wastes from industrial countries to less- developed countries.

International treaties have reduced

hazardous waste

• By 2010, this agreement had been signed by 175

countries and ratified by 172 countries.

• The United States, Afghanistan, and Haiti have

signed but have not ratified the convention.

• Hazardous waste smugglers evade the laws by

using an array of tactics.

International treaties have reduced

hazardous waste

• In 2000, the Swedish Parliament enacted a law that,

by 2020, will ban all chemicals that are persistent in

the environment and that can accumulate in living

tissue.

• Industries required to perform risk assessments on the chemicals they use and to show that these chemicals are safe to use, as opposed to requiring the government to show that they are dangerous.
• Strong opposition to this approach in the United States.

We can make the transition to low-

waste societies

• Many environmental scientists argue that we can

make a transition to a low-waste society by

understanding and following key principles:

• Everything is connected.
• There is no away , as in to throw away , for the wastes we produce.
• Polluters and producers should pay for the wastes they produce.
• Different categories of hazardous waste and recyclable waste should not be mixed.

End of “Short Version”

• The slides that follow are those taken out of

the “long version” of this same lecture. You

should still read the following slides for better

understanding, but I will not go over them in

class unless you have specific questions.

We can burn or bury solid waste or

produce less of it

• Waste management in which we attempt to manage

wastes in ways that reduce their environmental harm

without seriously trying to reduce the amount of

waste produced.

• Waste reduction (produce much less waste and

pollution), and the wastes we do produce are

considered to be potential resources that can be

reused, recycled, or composted.

• Integrated waste management—a variety of

strategies for both waste reduction and waste

management.

We can cut solid wastes by reducing,

reusing, and recycling

• Strategies that industries and communities have used

to reduce resource use, waste, and pollution.

• Redesign manufacturing processes and products to use less material and energy.
• Develop products that are easy to repair, reuse, remanufacture, compost, or recycle.
• Eliminate or reduce unnecessary packaging.
• Charge consumers by amount of waste they throw away but provide free pickup of recyclable and reusable items.
• Establish cradle-to-grave responsibility laws that require companies to take back various discarded consumer products, such as electronic equipment, appliances, and motor vehicles.

Reuse is an important way to reduce solid waste

and pollution, and to save money

• Increasingly substituted throwaway items for reusable ones, which has resulted in growing masses of solid waste.
• Reuse involves cleaning and using materials over and over and thus increasing the typical life span of a product.
• Waste reduction decreases the use of matter and energy resources, cuts pollution and waste, creates local jobs, and saves money.
• In many less-developed countries, the poor scavenge in open dumps for food scraps and items that they can reuse or sell, and are often exposed to toxins and infectious diseases.

There are two types of recycling

• Recycling involves reprocessing discarded solid

materials into new, useful products.

• Households and workplaces produce five major

types of materials that we can recycle: paper

products, glass, aluminum, steel, and some plastics.

• Primary, or closed-loop, recycling—materials are

recycled into new products of the same type.

• Secondary recycling— waste materials converted

into different products.

There are two types of recycling

• Key questions about recycling:
  • Do the items that are separated for recycling actually get recycled?
  • Do businesses, governments, and individuals complete the recycling loop by buying products that are made from recycled materials?