There is no such thing as waste, only wasted resources. — Chris Peot, Civil Engineer for DC Water, which treats waste water for Washington, D.C.
From toilets to plastics to sludge to food scraps, America is urgently seeking new technologies to deal with waste disposal. The United States currently produces 12 billion tons of waste annually, but in the eyes of “garbologists,” most trash can be transformed into another person’s treasure.
Of that 12 billion tons, less than 5 percent (or approximately 350 million tons) is disposed of as curbside pickup. In other words, households, small businesses, schools and other sources of municipal solid waste (MSW in the jargon) represent a relatively small amount of the country’s exploding landfills.
The other 95 percent, also known as invisible trash, includes the waste from mining, construction, demolition, farming, sewers and other industrial activities. Many of these create invisible costs to society.
For example, mail-order companies that convince us to buy a new computer every few years or to continually update our wardrobe do not usually pay the cost for disposing of the plastic and cardboard required to ship the goods, but this is an enormous expense borne by consumers and their local communities.
Two important solutions exist to avert our impending “world of waste.”
One involves new technologies, whereby trash is transformed into important resources for another industrial use. With innovation, lawn clippings can become the biofuels of the future; plastics are transformed into tiles and building materials; plastic bags and old garments can be rewoven into designer clothes; and sewage has become an essential source of fertilizer. For young students seeking a promising career, designing a better toilet, reusing old building materials or turning carbon dioxide into cement represent critical research opportunities.
Stanford professor and business entrepreneur Brent Constantz hopes to transform carbon dioxide (otherwise known as air pollution) into a useful building material by copying the way coral reefs are constructed by Mother Nature.
By combining sea water with carbon dioxide to manufacture cement, his product could potentially store massive amounts of carbon. The notion of sea-water cement is one of many resource reclamation solutions under scrutiny by innovative science and engineering laboratories throughout the world.
The second important solution to reducing waste involves changing the American “throwaway” culture into a trash-to-treasure mentality. In South Korea, grocery stores charge extra for plastic bags; this not only encourages reuse of shopping bags but also reduces global plastic consumption. Many companies buy back glass bottles. China has an expanding business of purchasing industrial wastes from other countries to recycle into new materials. The European Union is talking about the “end of waste.”
Recently in Science Magazine, Janet Hering, director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, asked the question, “If an unwanted byproduct of one industry can be used as a feedstock for another, is it a waste or a resource?” She explains how the European Union is not only addressing its consumption habits, but hoping to adjust them according to the limits of planet Earth.
Given the enormous amount of garbage generated by industry compared with households, does this mean we can ease up on recycling at the homefront? Absolutely not! Although the amount of America’s MSW is relatively small in the world of garbology, the importance of changing our culture is critical for the 21st century.
To educate the next generation without the throwaway culture that their parents embraced is a critical solution to avert a trash disaster throughout the planet. From-trash-to-treasure needs to be the new mantra for Generation Z.
Meg Lowman, a longtime Sarasota-based scientist and educator, is chief of science and sustainability at the California Academy of Sciences.
Originally posted in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
