Introduction

The generation of waste especially solid waste is the inevitable consequence of all processes where materials are used. Extraction of raw materials, manufacture of products, consumption, and waste management all generate wastes. The rate of material use today is so large, both with regard to the total amounts and seen as a per capita average, that the waste generated will impact on the environmental quality and human health worldwide if it is not managed properly. A few centuries, or even decades ago, the solid waste generated was a small fraction of what it is today, the drivers of the generation are primarily the increased availability of energy and secondly the population growth. Waste generation is also related to urbanization and global trade. Archeologists derive information of old times through the wastes that oldest cities are built on. From the subsurface strata, it is possible to learn that waste generation has varied much over time. Poor waste management contributes to climate change and air pollution, and directly affects many ecosystems and species. Landfills release methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas linked to climate change. Methane is formed by microorganisms present in landfills from biodegradable waste, such as food, paper and garden waste. Depending on the way they are built, landfills might also contaminate soil and water. After waste is collected, it is transported and treated. The transport process releases carbon dioxide — the most prevalent greenhouse gas — and air pollutants, including particulate matter, into the atmosphere.

Effect of Waste

Some ecosystems, like the marine and coastal ones, can be severely affected by poor management of waste, or by littering. Marine litter is a growing concern, and not only for aesthetic reasons: entanglement and ingestion constitute severe threats to many marine species. Waste impacts the environment indirectly as well. Whatever is not recycled or recovered from waste represents a loss of raw material and other inputs used in the chain, i.e. in the production, transport and consumption phases of the product. Environmental impacts in the life-cycle chain are significantly larger than those in the waste management phases alone. Directly or indirectly, waste affects our health and well-being in many ways: methane gases contribute to climate change, air pollutants are released into the atmosphere, freshwater sources are contaminated, crops are grown in contaminated soil and fish ingest toxic chemicals, subsequently ending up on our dinner plates. Illegal activities such as illegal dumping, burning or exports also play a part, but it is difficult to estimate the full extent of such activities, or of their impacts. Waste also represents an economic loss and burden to our society. Labour and the other inputs (land, energy, etc.) used in its extraction, production, dissemination and consumption phases are also lost when the ‘leftovers’ are discarded.

Moreover, waste management costs money. Creating an infrastructure for collecting, sorting and recycling is costly, but once in place, recycling can generate revenues and create jobs. There is also a global dimension to waste, linked to our exports and imports. What we consume and produce in Europe could generate waste elsewhere. And in some instances, it actually becomes a good traded across borders, both legally and illegally.

Conclusion

What if we could use waste as a resource and thereby scale down the demand for extraction of new resources? Extracting fewer materials and using existing resources would help avert some of the impacts created along the chain. In this context, unused waste also represents a potential loss. Turning waste into a resource by 2025 is one of the key objectives of the EU’s Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe. The roadmap also highlights the need to ensure high-quality recycling, eliminate landfilling, limit energy recovery to non-recyclable materials, and stop illegal shipments of waste. And it is possible to achieve these things. In many countries, kitchen and gardening waste constitutes the biggest fraction of municipal solid waste. This type of waste, when collected separately, can be turned into an energy source or fertilizer. Anaerobic digestion is a waste treatment method that involves submitting bio-waste to a biological decomposition process similar to the one in landfills, but under controlled conditions. Anaerobic digestion produces biogas and residual material, which in turn can be used as fertilizer, like compost. An EEA study from 2011 looked at the potential gains from better management of municipal waste. Its findings are striking. Improved management of municipal waste between 1995 and 2008 resulted in significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions, mainly attributable to lower methane emissions from landfill and emissions avoided through recycling. If, by 2025, all countries fully meet the Landfill Directive’s landfill diversion targets, they could cut an additional 62 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions from the life cycle — which would be a significant contribution to the EU’s climate change mitigation efforts.

References

https://www.eea.europa.eu/signals/signals-2014/articles/waste-a-problem-or-a-resource