Reduction is the first and most effective way to eliminate waste. To reduce waste we must consume less. This might involve the most work for individuals. For example, cooking fresh foods reduces the amount of packaging we throw away. If enough people reduce their consumption by living a simpler lifestyle, then companies will produce less, and there will be a large scale reduction in waste.

Reuse comes next in the hierarchy, before recycling. Reuse is also called "primary recycling" – use of the same product for the same purpose again and again. Empty bottles can be refilled with liquids; empty Chinese food containers can be used to store leftovers; old computers can be donated; reusable diapers can cut down on bulky diapers; and e-readers and computers can substitute for printed newspapers, which are a large portion of landfill waste. Organic waste can be composted, rather than thrown away, and then used in next year’s vegetable garden. Choosing a reusable product saves you money and keeps material from entering a landfill.

Why does recycling comes last in the hierarchy? What we think of as recycling is actually known as "secondary recycling," the process of using bulk materials from recycled products to make new products. Despite advances in technology, recycling still fails to reclaim some products, like complex mixes of plastic (#7), greasy pizza boxes, or glass that breaks on the way to the recycling facility. Recycling consumes energy. Some materials, like aluminum and steel cans, consume remarkably little energy to reprocess. Plastics, however are cheaper to manufacture from raw materials. Recycling is more sustainable than landfilling, though, and the extra cost and effort are necessary in greening our way of life.

The waste hierarchy can be applied at any level, not just in the home. Manufactures should be encouraged to design products and processes with materials that can be used again, or that can be recycled. This cradle-to-cradle paradigm for materials usage is already attracting followers, and cradle-to-cradle certification is available for companies that use this method to develop products that create minimal waste in their lifecycles.

Any materials that cannot be reduced, reused, or recycled still must be disposed of in some way. Options like incineration or landfilling are not part of the three Rs, and are not desirable for many communities. Many of us believe they are too dangerous and unsustainable to justify their use at all – this is why we try to come up with alternatives. Eliminating waste will require creativity and dedication. Modern societies have no long-standing traditions to guide how we use our materials, and many of the materials available to use have never been seen before on earth. It is far easier and more profitable to be wasteful, and we’ve all learned recently that the market does not necessarily lead to the most ethical ways of doing things. What we choose to do with our materials today may determine humanity’s quality of life for thousands of years to come.

Trash does not simply get put on a truck every Tuesday morning and disappear. Any product is eventually used up, and must be recycled or disposed of. Solid waste, be it recyclable or not, has its own processing facilities, and is a significant industry. Chemistry and environmental science are not the only methods that can be used to help us deal with solid waste management – we can use economics, the science of resource distribution, to understanding our trash, and help shape our environmental outlook.

Economics is the study of people, companies, and governments interacting in the marketplace to decide how to distribute and use resources. All of these have something to do with what happens to our trash and recyclables. Each has goals, and each goal has its own costs and benefits. Often, what’s good for one group isn’t necessarily good for the others, or for the environment. However, because environmental awareness is a strong part of modern culture, no person or company can ignore the impact of its actions in the way we could a century ago, when many houses had private landfills and hazardous waste was just dumped in the nearest stream.

Our economic analysis of waste starts with disposal goals. Families and households want to get rid of the things they don’t need. Waste management companies, including trash haulers, landfill operators, and recycling plants, all want to make a profit by providing this service. Governments, from your town and county councils up to federal regulatory agencies, want to ensure the safety and satisfaction of their citizens, in the present and future. More specifically, regulators create policies that balance everyone’s goals, making sure that the outcome of any action is best for everyone.

Economists assume that if it were legal, everyone would dump their trash wherever is convenient. Laws exist to protect the environment from this kind of dumping by establishing places to dispose materials and safe practices, which of course cost money to enforce. Traditionally, property taxes pay for the operation of municipal landfills and subsidize trash hauling. Since many places also have recycling programs now, these must also be funded. Governments have many different funding strategies, and you might be surprised to learn how these can affect your behavior.

Paying for waste disposal with property taxes hides the true cost of disposal. There is no incentive for us to pay attention to what we do with our trash or recyclables. By contrast, some cities, like Seattle, have what are called “pay as you throw” programs, where households pay a fee for every bag of trash they put out for curbside collection. This cost covers most or all of the “tipping fee” charged by landfills for trash to be deposited there. Because families have to pay, they are more aware of what they’re throwing out. Cities with pay as you throw programs typically report a 30% decrease in landfilling and a corresponding increase in recycling.

Most recycling programs are subsidized as a public service. We know recycling is good for the environment because it reduces the use of raw materials and pollution associated with manufacturing new containers. However, many households would not recycle if there was significant cost or effort involved. In fact, some households won’t recycle if there is no incentive to do so. In cases where subsidized single stream curbside recycling ensures that the cost and effort of recycling is the same or less then throwing things away, we find that people choose to recycle as much as they can, especially if there is reduced cost or effort involved.

Many other programs create different incentives or fund waste management programs. Producers can be charged an “advance disposal fee” for products with unrecyclable packaging, raising its cost and encouraging consumers to choose recyclable alternatives, as well as providing funding for disposal. Or, under a deposit/refund scheme, a deposit is built into the shelf price of many beverages. Consumers receive a refund of the deposit when they return a container to a recycling center, store, or the manufacturer. In cities and states with beverage container refunds, this doubles as an important source of income for the homeless, and leads to reduced litter as well.

People are notoriously stubborn about changing their habits, even when the change is for their own good. With environmental concern now prevalent in our culture, most people are aware of the benefits of recycling and practice it at some level. However, we still produce almost twice as much waste per person than we did fifty years ago. Effective legislation creates tangible financial incentives that encourage recycling and discourage waste by making their real cost apparent to everyone, rather than hiding it in other taxes. Aligning people’s actions in the short term with what’s good for them in the long term in this way may face opposition, but it encourages us to make responsible decisions. With a fair and creative mix of funding strategies, we can go a long way toward ensuring that we continue to have the resources and healthy environment we need to enjoy healthy and abundant lives for generations to come.

In another article I’d like to cover the pitfalls of Incinerators and so called Waste-to-Energy plants that incentivize burning trash and recyclables in lieu of better zero waste policies.

Sources:
“The Cost of Reducing Municipal Solid Waste” by Karen Palmer, et al. Produced for Resources for the Future. www.rff.org/documents/RFF-DP-96-35.pdf

“The Economics of Municipal Solid Waste” by David Beede and David Bloom. Abstract available at http://wbro.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/10/2/113

Americans generated a total of 333 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2009. (Municipal solid waste, MSW for short, is the official term for anything that households throw away or recycle.) That’s an average of four and a half pounds of solid waste per person per day. Keep in mind that this estimate may be on the little high side, since it includes things like refrigerators that we don’t throw out every day. But still, I bet you didn’t think everything you threw out added up to so much.

Where does all this waste come from? According to the report, 31% is packaging. Nondurable goods, things like newspapers, are 23%; 18% is durable goods — items like clothing. Yard waste and food scraps are each 13%.

Nationally, 33% of our waste is “recovered” — in other words, recycled. However, while some communities are recovering around 60% of their MSW, others still lack access to even basic recycling programs. Also, economics sometimes dictates what gets recycled; some communities won’t pay for recycling centers because dumping in a landfill is cheaper.

Economics and technology have a lot to do with what gets recycled and what doesn’t. 55% of paper, including packaging, office paper, and newspaper, is recycled. Paper retains much of its durability through the recycling process, and requires minimal addition of raw materials. By contrast, only 7% of plastic is recycled. The recycling process consumes a great amount of energy, releases green house gases, and is more expensive than manufacturing new plastic from petroleum.

So what do these numbers say about the state of our waste management? Have we made any progress?

The amount of trash that goes into landfills today is actually very slightly lower than it was in the 1960s, when there was no municipal recycling. So with all our advances in recycling, we’ve really only made up for increased consumption since World War II. Going further than this may be much more difficult, since all the easily recyclable materials are being recycled, at least in areas where recycling is available. Expanding the network of recycling centers is one solution. Additional local laws, such as bottle bills and pay-as-you-throw programs, can create large gains in recycling when implemented, even in areas that already have conventional recycling programs. If we truly want to do something about our country’s ever expanding landfills, we can’t just choose between a few simple alternatives — we must use every tool at our disposal.

Learn more about these tools in the next article, The Economics of Trash.

Source:
EPA – Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2008 (PDF): available at http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/msw99.htm

Thousands of people and companies have discovered a great way to decrease emissions and save money at the same time. There doesn’t have to be a tradeoff between protecting the earth and enjoying cheap, convenient travel and commerce. Rail travel and shipping are very obvious ways to decrease the environmental impact of our way of life without new economic costs. An extensive network of tracks rivaling our interstate highway system already exists, and lays waiting for us to use its full capacity.

Many individuals and commercial entities have already caught on to the benefits of railway use. Ridership on Amtrak, our nation’s only high-speed intercity rail line, has increased an average of 1.8 percent each year since 1991. Likewise, since 1980, freight rail use as a percentage of all available modes of transportation has gone from 30% in 1980 to 42% in 2006. Shippers and travelers have consistently been drawn to rail travel over recent decades.

The Obama administration has identified infrastructural improvement as a key aspect of its economic recovery plan, and has gone as far as to allocate funds for rail projects and empower the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to develop a national rail plan for long term development. The FRA’s Preliminary National Rail Plan identifies safety, reliability, and relatively lower logistic costs as key features driving the increased use of our railways. In other words, users do not select rail because of their environmental concerns; they select it because of practical considerations of cost, convenience, and whether they or their shipments will arrive on time. The plan highlights pronounced environmental benefits as secondary effects of the increased use that will come with infrastructural improvement. For example, passenger rail travel uses an average of 21% less energy per passenger mile than automobile travel; freight transportation is between 1.9 and 5.5 times more energy efficient than trucking, with greater benefit at longer distances; and easily accessible intercity rail reduces highway congestion and creates attractive urban living environments, which have a host of environmental benefits of their own.

The railway industry stands alone among forms of overland transportation in that it finances the construction of its own infrastructure. Where highways are financed by federal, state, and local agencies and provided as a public good, rail freight companies have been largely responsible for investment in track laying, procuring right-of-way, and providing connections with other modes of transport. The industry even pays property taxes for land it owns and operates on. All of this is financed through shipping charges and fares. This proven viability under market conditions means that the rail industry is more than adequately poised to take advantage of funds made available by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

Our railways present an easy opportunity to significantly reduce our national carbon footprint. Even given the need for expanded capacity and new passenger lines, right-of-way is already long established along the lines of our present rail corridors. With all these advantages, intercity rail may seem like a cure-all for our transportation problems. However, a straight line from point A to point B is rarely an easy or unobstructed route, no matter how you travel.

National promotion of rail shipping and travel is sure to encounter opposition from the automotive and petroleum industries. The automakers and oil producers depend on our continued use of personal cars to get to and from work, shopping and tourist destinations, and anywhere else we go (as well as government handouts and continued instability in the Middle East). They have a long history of opposition to railway use; between the late 1930s and 1950, GM, Firestone, Standard Oil, and a couple other companies even went as far as to form monopolistic holding companies to buy floundering electric streetcar lines and replace them with bus services in these areas.

Even without industry conspiracy, Americans’ own attitudes may be the greatest barrier to increased rail use. Millions of people ride the rails every day, but millions more drive to work, the store, and other destinations. Whereas the value or moving freight by rail is becoming increasingly evident to many companies, passenger rail use requires lifestyle adjustments. First, a rail commuter or traveler is constrained by a train schedule. She may have to walk a couple blocks from a train station to her destination, rather than travelling directly from door to door. She might have to go through transfers, interchanges, or worst of all, have to spend time in close proximity with her fellow rail travelers on a daily basis. Whether we care to admit it or, our love of convenience is a cornerstone of the culture of the car, and a major barrier to the widespread adoption of passenger rail.

Increased rail use and capacity is inevitable. Commercial freight companies can and do invest in the infrastructural improvements necessary to their industry, and enjoy an increasing share of the overland shipping market. However, on the passenger side, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. U.S. ridership, average speed, and access to passenger rail all lag behind all other industrial nations. Hopefully nothing will derail the administration’s attempts to at least give us the option of enjoying fast, efficient intercity rail travel.

Source:

1. FRA Preliminary National Rail Plan, http://www.fra.dot.gov/Downloads/RailPlanPrelim10-15.pdf