What Does "Zero Waste" Really Mean?
In addition to being a tangible goal, Zero Waste is a philosophy and a design principle. It takes the position that waste is not an inevitable by-product of culture. Zero Waste advises us to look to natural systems where nothing is wasted -- everything is used to benefit some part of the system. To be successful, Zero Waste requires a fundamental shift in our linear production-to-waste processes. It goes beyond our current ideas of recycling by taking a whole system approach to the vast flow of resources and waste through human society. On a practical level, Zero Waste reduces consumption, maximizes recycling, minimizes waste, and ensures that products are made to be reused, repaired or recycled back into nature or the marketplace.
The Five Basic Tenants of Zero Waste
(From www.grrn.org/zerowaste)
Redesigning Products and Packaging. Planning in advance to limit resource
consumption, toxicity, and waste, and planning to recover materials through reuse, recycling, or composting. In essence, designing products for the environment, not for the dump.
Producer Responsibility. Manufacturers are held responsible for the waste and environmental impact their product and packaging creates, rather than passing that responsibility on to the consumer. The end result is that manufacturers redesign products to reduce materials consumption and facilitate reuse, recovery and recycling.
Investing in Infrastructure, Not Landfills or Incinerators. Rather than using the tax base to build new landfills and incinerators, communities can continue to invest in facilities designed to take the place of a landfill or incinerator. Combined with social policies and market signals, our current technology can easily support the diversion of 90% of society's discards.
Ending Taxpayer Subsidies for Wasteful and Polluting Industries. Pollution, energy consumption and environmental destruction start at the point of virgin resource extraction and processing. Manufacturers use virgin resources for raw material partly because tax subsidies and other social policies make this a cheaper and easier alternative to using recycled or recovered materials. Additional public subsidies exist to keep "disposal" costs through landfills and incinerators artificially low by not assigning significant economic penalties to the harmful emissions produced by these facilities.
Creating Jobs and New Businesses from Discards. Wasting materials in a landfill or incinerator also wastes business opportunities that could be created if those resources were preserved. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance, sorting and processing recyclables sustains ten times more jobs than landfilling or incineration. Some recycling-based paper mills and recycled plastic product manufacturers employ 60 times more workers on a per-ton basis than do landfills. Each recycling step a community takes locally means more jobs, more business expenditures on supplies and services, and more money circulating in the local economy through spending and tax payments.
From a Million to Zero in 32 Years
After endorsing the Zero Waste goal in 2006, the City of Austin plans to reduce the amount of garbage sent to landfill by 20 percent per capita by 2012 and to achieve zero waste by 2040. In aiming for the zero waste goal, Austin joins a growing list of cities from Seattle to Toronto to Buenos Aires.
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Did you know? |
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The average landfill is 172 acres, and is almost 28 feet below the ground and 43 feet aboveground. |
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A municipal solid waste landfill can hold about 650 pounds of waste per cubic yard of landfill space. |
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Texas has 187 active landfills. |
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Construction and demolition (C&D) waste makes up about 20% of the Texas waste stream. |
Consultant Gary Liss has been hired to create a Zero Waste Plan for Austin. The Zero Waste effort should help bring construction waste management (CWM) into the spotlight. The building industry sends a staggering amount of materials to our landfills -- 136 million tons in the U.S. alone. Not only is this unnecessary, it's expensive. Construction waste is low-hanging fruit for the zero waste effort because it is almost entirely reusable and recyclable.
The Case for Construction Waste Management
Managing construction waste makes both economic and evironmental sense. A recent presentation by Liss reveals that Austin annually tosses over a million tons of construction and demolition (C&D) material into landfills. This includes 60,000 tons of wood, 50,000 tons of metal and 50,000 tons of glass. Much of this material is perfectly usable. And valuable. In fact, we may be tossing out over 40 million dollars in usable materials.
There's Gold in Them There Landfills
WorldChanging writer Jeremy Faludi may be right when he says that the "get-rich scheme of the coming century will be to buy up mining rights to landfills today, then wait ten or twenty years for the value of the metals, plastics, and other recyclables in them to skyrocket."
Green Building Requirements
Austin Energy Green Building requires all projects to manage construction waste by recycling or salvaging construction,
demolition/deconstruction, and land clearing waste. Our goal is to reduce the amount of waste
destined for the landfill or incineration thus saving disposal costs, extending
the life of the landfill, and saving energy, resources, and costs by reusing materials.
Commercial and Multi-family ratings require a CWM plan that specifies 50% (by weight) of non-hazardous construction waste be diverted from the landfill.
A Residential rating requires the builder to have a CWM plan that specifies a minimum 25% (by volume) of construction waste to be used on site.
Best practice is to use construction waste on site as much as possible. This reduces transportation and disposal problems such as pollution from vehicle emissions and shortened life of disposal sites. Savvy builders may also be able to find uses for deconstructed materials in a new structure, as these materials are often much higher quality
than available new materials.
To be successful, CWM requires a plan and good communication. An onsite materials storage area with separate bins for all materials is very helpful but if that's not possible, there are several local companies who will pick up and sort materials for potential re-use or recycling.
In Austin, materials that can be re-used or recycled include:
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Appliances and fixtures |
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Asphalt (for road repair) |
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Brush, trees, and land clearing debris (for compost and mulch) |
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Lumber and plywood |
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Masonry and concrete rubble (for fill) |
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Roofing, windows, and doors |
Carpet, cardboard and paper, metals and plastics can all be recycled.
Resources
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