Category Archives: Waste Management

Robust Techniques for Sustainable Agricultural Waste Management

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Agricultural waste, encompassing both organic and inorganic materials leftover from farming activities, poses a significant challenge and opportunity in equal measure. The residues from crop production and livestock farming, including crop stalks, animal manure, packaging, and agricultural chemicals, present a dual nature.

When managed effectively, these materials hold immense potential due to their biodegradability and nutrient richness. Conversely, improper handling can lead to adverse impacts on ecosystems, soil fertility reduction, water pollution, and health concerns for humans.

Biomass from Agriculture

In addressing the mounting challenges of agricultural waste and the growing global population’s food demands, it’s imperative to institute efficient waste management systems within farms.

Varieties of Agricultural Wastes

Agricultural waste encompasses a wide array of materials generated from farming activities, including:

  •       Crop residues are stalks, leaves, husks, and straw left post-harvest of wheat, rice, corn, and sugarcane.
  •       Animal manure comprises feces, urine, and bedding materials.
  •       Agrochemical containers include those for pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.
  •       Leftover feed materials include grains, forages, etc.
  •       Harvest and process waste, including fruit peels, vegetable trimmings, and rejected produce.
  •       Packaging materials include plastic bags, cardboard boxes, and containers.
  •       Green waste consists of trimmings, prunings, plant debris, and grass clippings.

Understanding Agricultural Waste Management

Agricultural waste management involves the coordination, handling, and control of waste generated from farming. The primary aim is to prevent soil and water pollution, curb greenhouse gas emissions, and mitigate health risks for both humans and animals.

Effective agricultural waste management typically revolves around techniques focusing on the storage of raw materials and waste reduction, recycling, and reuse. These methods convert waste into valuable resources such as organic fertilizers or green energy like biogas, proving beneficial for the environment, agricultural organizations, and the communities they serve.

Implementing Sustainable Techniques for Agricultural Waste Management

Composting

Composting proves effective in managing various agricultural products like plant residues, trimmings, and manure by converting them into nutrient-rich compost. This approach is scalable and feasible in diverse settings, from home gardens to large-scale agriculture, enhancing soil fertility and crop productivity while minimizing reliance on synthetic chemical fertilizers.

Biogas Generation

Biogas production, particularly in developing countries, has gained traction for its ability to convert waste into renewable energy. Biogas digesters, widely implemented in rural areas, offer an eco-friendly solution by converting crop waste into biogas that is usable for cooking, heating, and electricity generation. The EU is also promoting biogas generation for sustainable agricultural waste management on a larger scale, leading to improved living conditions and reduced pollution.

biogas-crop

Mulching

Using agricultural solid waste as mulch helps conserve soil moisture, suppress weed growth, and enhance nutrient retention. This practice shields the soil from erosion and temperature fluctuations, improving crop health and productivity. Commonly used materials for mulching include straw, hay, crop residues, leaves, and grass clippings.

Biomass Conversion

Techniques like thermochemical and biochemical conversion processes transform agricultural waste into valuable products like biofuels, biochemicals, and bioplastics. Processes like combustion, fermentation, pyrolysis, and gasification enable the production of heat, biofuels, and various chemicals from agricultural waste.

agricultural-wastes

Recycling Packaging Materials

Though essential in agricultural practices, materials like plastic containers and bags contribute significantly to agricultural waste. Proper recycling via collection, sorting, and processing reduces the environmental impact, supporting the circular economy and conserving natural resources.

In a Nutshell

Implementing effective agricultural waste management practices is crucial for sustainable farming. Small-scale anaerobic digestion stands out as an accessible and efficient waste management solution, enabling farms to harness green energy sources and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, thereby embracing a circular economy. Farmers play a pivotal role in optimizing resource usage and minimizing environmental impact through innovative waste management approaches.

The Complete Guide to Disposing of Contaminated Soil

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Do you need to remove contaminated soil from your property? If so, this article will explain how to dispose of it safely.

Hire a professional company

Ideally, you’ll want to hire a professional waste treatment company to remove contaminated soil, which will ensure the soil gets properly treated at a facility. If you hire a random company or person, the materials might only be discarded where they will pose a danger to the environment, animals, and people.

disposal of contaminated soil

Proper contaminated soil disposal requires reputable industrial treatment facilities that use EPA-approved treatment processes, including chemical fixation, bioremediation, chemical oxidation, and absorption.

Soil can be treated in four different ways:

  • Excavation. Contaminated soil is removed from the ground. New topsoil is tested and distributed where the old soil has been removed.
  • Treatment. Here, the soil is treated in the ground where it is. There are various methods of extracting contaminants without removing the soil.
  • Containment. When soil can’t be removed or treated in place, it may be contained within some kind of barrier (such as a silt fence) that prevents it from spreading.
  • Blending. Depending on the level of contamination, sometimes good soil is blended with contaminated soil to reduce the concentration of harmful chemicals to a safer degree.

Some treatment plants also focus primarily on sustainability to limit the environmental impact of their services.

What contaminants make soil dangerous?

A variety of contaminants can make soil dangerous. Some of the most common one found in soils all over the world include:

  • Oil and grease
  • Asbestos
  • Adhesives, glues, resins, and latex
  • Laboratory chemicals
  • Filter cake
  • PFAS contaminants
  • Persistent organic pollutants (POPs)
  • Surfactants and detergents
  • Spent catalysts
  • Coolants and cutting fluids
  • Hydrocarbon contamination
  • Paints, inks, and dyes
  • Rags and absorbents
  • Heavy metals
  • Acid sulphate
  • Solvents and flammable waste
  • Contaminated sludge and slurries
  • Acids
  • Industrial wash waters
  • Dredge spoil

All of these contaminants can turn regular soil into hazardous waste.

Treat contaminated soil as hazardous waste

Soil contamination is considered hazardous waste and needs to be professionally removed and treated right away. Contaminated soil can become a major problem if you don’t take care of it quickly.

When left in place, contaminated soil can leach toxic chemicals into the ground and surface waters. The contamination may make its way into nearby rivers, streams, lakes, and drinking water supplies.

According to the EPA, contaminated soil can also affect indoor air quality and may be spread further as dust. In the water, contaminants accumulate in sediments that end up harming local ecosystems, wildlife, and humans.

If you don’t handle the problem, you could face lawsuits later on if future damage and harms can be traced back to the soil when you were responsible for it.

You will likely need a permit to remove contaminated soil

In many regions, you will have to obtain proper permits from your state’s environmental agency to remove hazardous soil.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set specific guidelines for removal of contaminants from soil at Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and other hazardous waste facilities.

These guidelines can be helpful in understanding why you need a professional to do the job. If you’re facing the onerous task of taking care of contaminated soil, it’s not likely to be a DIY job.

Contaminated soil can come from anywhere

You may not even know you have contaminated soil on your property. You might order tons of good, clean soil for purchase and have hazardous waste delivered instead. That’s what happened to a couple in Kentucky.

David and Cindy Bell ordered thousands of tons of fill dirt and rock to level their property in preparation for building a garden and campground. They found a company willing to deliver the dirt for free.

Unfortunately, the company delivered contaminated black soil and sand removed from an industrial work site. When tests were run, the soil samples contained excessive levels of certain contaminants, including heavy metals and carcinogens.

how to remove remove contaminated soil

Even though it wasn’t their fault, the state issued the Bells a Notice of Violation that required the couple to install a special fence to prevent the contaminated soil from leaching into the Ohio River.

Test your soil regularly, especially if you grow food

You should test your soil regularly to make sure it’s not hazardous to the Earth, humans, or animals. If you discover you have contaminated soil on your property and there are farms nearby, for example, there’s a chance that farmland can become contaminated and you might be held liable for damages.

If you learn you have contaminated soil, don’t wait to get it cleaned up. Act quickly, because the effects can be far-reaching. Regular testing is the only way to know what’s going on with your soil.

Circular Economy: Viewpoint of Plastic

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Pieces of plastic have been trying to get our attention. The first scientific reports of plastic pollution in oceans were in the early 1970s. This waste plastic soaks up other pollutants at up to a million times the concentration in water, harming and killing sea life worldwide. From the point of view of the plastic, we have convincingly failed with solutions. Over the past 40 years the problem has grown around 100 times, with now over 8 million tonnes of plastic waste added to oceans per year.

plastic-bottle

Everyone is aware about ways for plastic to not become waste. We can set up redesign, sharing, refill, recycling and even composting. When it comes to creating practical possibilities for not making waste, people are super smart. But when it comes to making policy to install this practice throughout the economy, which has been the aim of circular economy for the past four decades, we’re consistently collectively stupid. I call this mob thinking.

We have intelligent activists, business people, experts and officials unintentionally thinking like a mob? always bringing forward the same decades old policy weapons. When these weapons don’t work there is a discussion about strategy but not any actual new strategy, just talk about how forcefully to use the same old policy weapons. This is how it’s been possible for waste management, waste regulation and the unsolved waste problem to all grow in tandem for so long.

plastic-pollution-marine-life

The stomach and intestines of sperm whale was filled with 29 kg of garbage

If the piece of plastic had a voice in the circular economy debate what might it say? It would remind us to beware mob thinking. Today’s problems are solvable only by trying new thinking and new policy weapons. Precycling is an example. The piece of plastic doesn’t mind whether it’s part of a product that’s longlife or refilled or shared or refurbished or recycled or even composted (so long as it’s fully biodegradable). It doesn’t even mind being called ‘waste’ so long as it’s on its way to a new use. Action that ensures any of these is precycling.

Our piece of plastic does mind about ending up as ecosystem waste. It does not wish to join 5 trillion other pieces of plastic abandoned in the world’s oceans. It would be horrified to poison a fish or starve a sea bird. Equally it does not want to be perpetually entombed in a landfill dump or transformed into climate destabilising greenhouse gases by incineration.

plastic-pollution-manila

The two possible outcomes for a piece of plastic, remaining as a resource or being dumped as ecological waste, are the same fates awaiting every product. Our economies and our futures depend on our ambition in arranging the right outcome. The old policy weapons of prescriptive targets and taxes, trying to force more of one waste management outcome or less of another, are largely obsolete.

Circular economy can be fully and quickly implemented by policy to make markets financially responsible for the risk of products becoming ecological waste. Some ever hopeful pieces of plastic would be grateful if we would get on with doing this.

Harnessing Bioenergy from Everyday Rubbish

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Converting everyday rubbish into usable energy once seemed like science fiction, but bioenergy has made it reality. This sustainable solution transforms waste into valuable fuel sources while also benefiting the environment.

Bioenergy provides a profitable way to upcycle discarded items into clean power instead of letting them pile up in landfills. What was once treated as garbage now becomes a source of renewable energy for society’s needs. With bioenergy, there is potential to turn waste into an environmental and economic asset.

bioenergy from municipal waste

Definition of Bioenergy

You might be wondering what exactly is bioenergy? In simple terms, bioenergy is energy derived from organic materials. These materials can range from agricultural residues, forest waste, food scraps or even animal manure. The process of converting these ‘biomass’ resources into bioenergy can take several forms, like burning for heat and power, fermenting for biofuels or subjecting them to anaerobic digestion to generate biogas.

Various Sources of Bioenergy

Nature offers an abundance of sources for generating bioenergy. You have wood pellets and chips from forests, manure from farming activities, crop residues left after harvests and even energy crops grown explicitly for this purpose like switchgrass or miscanthus. The spectrum doesn’t end here though; household waste also qualifies as a potential contributor to this list which you will explore more next.

Understanding Everyday Rubbish

If you were thinking that household rubbish is just useless trash, think again! Household waste consists of food scraps, glass bottles, plastic containers, paper products – stuff that you discard every day. This seemingly insignificant rubbish when recycled correctly can generate appreciable amounts of bioenergy contributing towards sustainable energy practices for society.

Contribution of Rubbish Removals

The company Same Day Rubbish Removals plays a significant part in Melbourne’s waste management ecosystem by providing quick and efficient removal services. They responsibly handle all types of waste – from household junk to electronic waste and green waste which can boost the raw material sources for bioenergy. You can see the services on offer here https://www.samedayrubbishremovalmelbourne.com.au/.

Beyond mere rubbish collection and disposal, they also advocate for proper recycling which aligns perfectly with the ideal principles of bioenergy generation and closing the loop on waste management for a sustainable future.

Importance of Bioenergy

Bioenergy today holds tremendous importance in the roadmap towards carbon neutrality. It serves as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels thus reducing our carbon footprint. Not only for large industries, but it can also be adopted at the community level through bioenergy plants helping cities reduce their reliance on non-renewable energy sources. The end products such as electricity, heat or biofuels have wide applications across sectors.

 

Role of Everyday Rubbish

Everyday rubbish plays a crucial role in this bioenergy narrative. Home waste when segregated correctly can segregate organic wastes fit for conversion into bioenergy. Post-consumer packaging materials, when recycled, could divert significant volumes of waste from landfills and transform them into value-added bioenergy resources. Our household waste has the potential to shift the energy paradigm!

Detailed Process of Conversion

The conversion of biomass into bioenergy isn’t just a one-step process. It involves several stages: collection, separation and treatment followed by chemical reactions that help extract energy. Techniques such as anaerobic digestion turn organic wastes into biogas or advanced thermal technologies like gasification that convert solid waste into synthetic fuels.

Everyday Rubbish to Bioenergy: How?

If you are curious about how everyday rubbish transforms into bioenergy, carry on reading! Organic kitchen wastes or garden clippings undergo anaerobic digestion in specially designed digesters to produce methane-rich gas which is subsequently burnt to generate heat and electricity. Non-organic materials like plastics get subjected to advanced thermal methods to produce an oil-like substance that can substitute crude oil in refineries.

Benefits of Bioenergy Production

Bioenergy production brings multiple perks. Obviously, the generation of renewable energy is its biggest appeal, allowing us to cut back on fossil fuel usage. However, it’s also a great solution for managing waste more effectively and reducing the volume going to landfills daily. Additionally, it promotes recycling and could stimulate new employment and business opportunities in the waste management sector.

Anaerobic Digestion of Food Wastes

Challenges in Bioenergy Harnessing

Despite its myriad of benefits and potentials, bioenergy faces certain challenges that need to be tackled effectively. Issues such as high initial capital costs for setting up bioenergy plants and the lack of advanced technology for efficient transformation remain roadblocks. Apart from these, there is also a considerable lack of energy subsidies and regulatory policies favoring bioenergy.

Apart from this, the fluctuating biomass feedstock prices could affect the economic viability of bioenergy projects. Also, the public’s perception towards waste-to-energy conversion and their willingness to segregate their waste can also pose uncertainties in success rates.

Role of Technology in Bioenergy

Technology plays an irreplaceable role in streamlining and accelerating the conversion of everyday rubbish into bioenergy. Advanced processing technologies like anaerobic digestion, gasification, pyrolysis and fermentation not only make bioenergy production possible but have been instrumental in increasing its efficiency over time.

This evolution has been further revolutionized by innovations like next-generation sequencing techniques that promise improvements in the variety and capacity of bio-energy fuels achievable from waste.

The Concept of Waste Hierarchy

The concept of the waste hierarchy revolves around three key principles: reduce, reuse, and recycle. This system places a high emphasis on reducing waste generation to the maximum extent possible, reusing materials as long as their useful life permits and recycling what’s left to extract maximum value.

This strategy is fundamental to converting rubbish into bioenergy. The better people adhere to these principles, the more efficiently people can convert everyday waste into bioenergy fueling a closed-loop circular economy.

International Approaches to Bioenergy

The adoption of bioenergy strategies varies worldwide. In Europe, especially in countries like Germany and Sweden, aggressive renewable energy policies have promoted significant advances in bioenergy generation from waste. Conversely, in developing regions like Africa and South America, biomass-based heating and power applications are mainly used due to infrastructure constraints.

Every nation has different potential and challenges in embracing bioenergy. What’s crucial is adapting technologies to the specifics of each nation to fully harness the potential of waste-based bioenergy.

Different Bioenergy Technologies

There is a broad array of technologies that enable the transformation of rubbish to bioenergy. Anaerobic digestion and fermentation techniques predominantly deal with organic materials like food waste and crop residues. Pyrolysis and gasification are more suited for non-organic waste, converting complex matter into simpler forms that can be burned as fuels or further processed into biofuels or chemicals.

Such a spectrum of technologies can address varying types of wastes and produce diverse outputs making waste management versatile and flexible.

Policies on Bioenergy and Waste Management

Effective policies can stimulate bioenergy production from everyday rubbish removal. Strong waste management regulations coupled with initiatives that incentivize bioenergy projects could expedite the adoption of this technology in not only industries but also smaller communities.

Acknowledging the environmental benefits of waste-based bioenergy through a carbon credit system can create an enabling environment for this sector to thrive.

The Summary

Synthesizing bioenergy from rubbish is a poignant example of sustainability in action. As people strive towards a cleaner planet, this alternate strategy could play a significant role. It’s about viewing our wastes not as a problem, but as an answer. To paraphrase Da Vinci, you know you have learned enough when you have grasped the principle of turning everything harmful into something beneficial. That is undoubtedly what converting solid waste into bioenergy achieves.

Role of Anaerobic Digestion in Food Waste Management

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Food waste is one of the single largest constituent of municipal solid waste stream. In a typical landfill, food waste is one of the largest incoming waste streams and responsible for the generation of high amounts of methane. Diversion of food waste from landfills can provide significant contribution towards climate change mitigation, apart from generating revenues and creating employment opportunities.

 

Of the different types of organic wastes available, food waste holds the highest potential in terms of economic exploitation as it contains high amount of carbon and can be efficiently converted into biogas and organic fertilizer. Food waste can either be utilized as a single substrate in a biogas plant, or can be co-digested with organic wastes like cow manure, poultry litter, sewage, crop residues, abattoir wastes etc or can be disposed in dedicated food waste disposers (FWDs). Rising energy prices and increasing environmental concerns makes it more important to harness clean energy from food wastes.

Anaerobic Digestion of Food Wastes

Anaerobic Digestion of Food Wastes

Anaerobic digestion is the most important method for the treatment of food waste because of its techno-economic viability and environmental sustainability. The use of anaerobic digestion technology generates biogas and preserves the nutrients which are recycled back to the agricultural land in the form of slurry or solid fertilizer. The relevance of biogas technology lies in the fact that it makes the best possible utilization of food wastes as a renewable source of clean energy.

A biogas plant is a decentralized energy system, which can lead to self-sufficiency in heat and power needs, and at the same time reduces environmental pollution. Thus, the benefits of anaerobic digestion of food waste includes climate change mitigation, economic benefits and landfill diversion opportunities.

Anaerobic digestion has been successfully used in several European and Asian countries to stabilize food wastes, and to provide beneficial end-products. Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Germany and England have led the way in developing new advanced biogas technologies and setting up new projects for conversion of food waste into energy.

food waste treatment

Codigestion at Wastewater Treatment Facilities

Anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge is wastewater treatment facilities is a common practice worldwide. Food waste can be codigested with sewage sludge if there is excess capacity in the anaerobic digesters. An excess capacity at a wastewater treatment facility can occur when urban development is overestimated or when large industries leave the area.

anaerobic_digestion_plant

By incorporating food waste, wastewater treatment facilities can have significant cost savings due to tipping fee for accepting the food waste and increasing energy production. Wastewater treatment plants are usually located in urban areas which make it cost-effective to transport food waste to the facility. This trend is catching up fast and such plants are already in operation in several Western countries.

The main wastewater treatment plant in East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD), Oakland (California) was the first sewage treatment facility in the USA to convert post-consumer food scraps to energy via anaerobic digestion. EBMUD’s wastewater treatment plant has an excess capacity because canneries that previously resided in the Bay Area relocated resulting in the facility receiving less wastewater than estimated when it was constructed. Waste haulers collect post-consumer food waste from local restaurants and markets and take it to EBMUD where the captured methane is used as a renewable source of energy to power the treatment plant. After the digestion process, the leftover material is be composted and used as a natural fertilizer.

The first food waste anaerobic digestion plant in Britain to be built at a sewage treatment plant is the city of Bristol. The plant, located at a Wessex Water sewage works in Avonmouth, process 40,000 tonnes of food waste a year from homes, supermarkets and business across the southwest and generate enough energy to power around 3,000 homes.

Aside from the coprocessing of food waste in wastewater treatment facilities, they can also incorporate greener and more cost-effective agents aiding the wastewater treatment process. For centuries, wastewater companies have utilized caustic soda or sodium hydroxide, a strong alkaline substance, to ionize and increase the pH level of water. This substance is also useful for eliminating heavy metals in water.

Despite the effectiveness of sodium hydroxide in wastewater treatment, corrosion of pipelines is a huge issue in many facilities, as well as the release of copper and lead when water flows into residential plumbing fixtures. However, when the pH of water is increased further, copper and lead contamination can be temporarily resolved, but at the expense of insoluble calcium carbonate build-up along pipe walls.

To present a better solution to this dilemma, wastewater plants can use a sodium hydroxide substitute like magnesium hydroxide which can serve as a greener, safer, and more cost-effective alternative. Compared to caustic soda, magnesium hydroxide offers the following advantages:

  • 40% reduction in chemical usage
  • Safer handling for wastewater facility operators
  • Less hazardous and more nutritive to microorganisms being maintained
  • Reduced sludge volume, thus lowering sludge hauling fees
  • Doesn’t irritate and burn the skin when in contact

A magnesium hydroxide alternative can perform the same advantages as the traditional caustic soda, but with less damages to people and the environment. If you’re looking into using new substitutes like sodium hydroxide in your facility, make sure to consult certified experts like a plant operator, chemical engineer, mechanical engineer, sanitary engineer, and the like.

Things to Consider While Hiring a Waste Management Company

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Whether talking about recycling for a home or business, this type of service is extremely important for the environment. Waste has a negative impact on the environment and can cause pollution of many kinds. Most companies that offer both garbage and recycling services are very organized, and consumers are expected to be equally organized in sorting their waste and separating it from recyclable items.

Because the process of figuring out what can be recycled, many individuals and business owners find it is much easier to simply hire a waste management company.

Below are some questions to consider when looking for recycling services and reasons why hiring a waste management company can take the guesswork out of recycling.

What Kind of Recycling Service is Required?

This can mean anything from home to office to hazardous waste to syringe collection services.  Some companies offer all types of recycling and provide the different skip bins necessary to mitigate these needs. It is important to contact the company and find out as much information that is needed to make an informed decision on how recycling is handled.

However, most companies will only offer a general list of items that can be recycled, including plastics, cardboards, glass, etc. This list will not be exhaustive, leaving many consumers to wonder what to do with items such as plastic bottle caps, milk cartons and the like. A waste management company will know the specific regulations for what can and cannot be recycled, eliminating the hassle for you.

What Can Be Recycled?

Bricks, wood, paper, metals, cardboard, plastics, concrete, and green waste can all be recycled.

  • Bricks – These are broken down and crushed in order to be made into new bricks.
  • Wood – Wood can be used again as a building material or can be processed into pulp or mulch. Recycling wood can limit the number of trees that are being cut down.
  • Paper – The process for this material mixes old paper with chemicals and water to break it down. It is then chopped, heated and broken down further into strands of cellulose.  This substance is then called slurry or pulp and is further recycled into new paper.
  • Metals – Recycling metals will not alter its properties, the most common metals recycled are steel and aluminum.
  • Cardboard – This uses a process that reuses thick sheets of multilayered papers (cardboard) that have been discarded.
  • Plastics – The recycling process for plastics recovers waste or scraps of plastic and reprocesses them into useful products.
  • Concrete – This type of recycling is becoming more common and uses a process of reuse of the rubble for new construction endeavors.
  • Green Waste – This can be anything from leaves to grass trimmings to flower cuttings that can be decomposed and then recycled. This will in turn produce what is called green waste.

There are a number of items that can be recycled, but it is important to note that not all recycling pickup services will be able to process all the items mentioned above. Certain materials, such as concrete or wood, must be disposed of at specific facilities.

plastic-wastes

Recycling has unending benefits

For the average homeowner, this can mean having to locate the specific facility and transport the recyclable materials to them. A waste management company will have the contacts in the industry to know where to take any type of recyclable item and can take care of the transportation for you.

What Recycling Techniques Are Used, and Are They Legal and Ethical?

  • Concretes and Aggregates – This process would involve using a crushing machine and combining the concrete with bricks, asphalt, dirt and rocks. The smaller pieces will be used as gravel, crushed concrete can all be used as dry aggregate, which in turn can be used to make new concrete that will be free of contaminates.
  • Batteries – This type of recycling can be very difficult; all batteries must be sorted into groups of similar kinds and require. Older batteries contain cadmium and mercury, which are very harmful and must be handled very carefully.
  • Biodegradable Waste – This type of waste can be made into reusable material via the process of biological decomposition. The two mechanisms that help this to occur are composting or converting it into soil improver and biogas. The latter uses anaerobic digestion where organic wastes are broken down by microorganisms in a biogas plant.

Again, a waste management company will be able to guarantee that your recycling ends up in the right processing facilities and to ensure that it does get processed according to government regulations and ethical means. When the wrong items end up in recycling, this can lead to an entire batch being thrown out. A waste management company will make sure that the recyclable items are properly sorted, helping to ensure that your efforts to recycle do not go to waste.

What Are the Benefits of Recycling?

There are many benefits to using a recycling service. For instance, recycling conserves energy, reduces greenhouse gases, reduces water and air pollution, and conserves natural resources by reusing recycled materials. Protecting the environment is one of the most important things a home or business can do. When an individual or business chooses to recycle all different kinds of waste, it makes the world a better, less toxic place to live.

Not only does recycling help protect the world, it also reduces the need for extraction such as mining, logging and quarrying. It also reduces the need for processing and refining of raw materials. All these processes can contain harmful, substantial amounts of water and air pollution. Recycling will save this energy while reducing the amount of greenhouse gas, which in turn helps to attack climate change.

Solid Waste Management in India – Role of Policies and Planning

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Out of all the measures that are necessary in addressing India’s waste management crisis, the most efficient will be changes at the national policy and planning level. It is well known among the small but growing waste management sector that urban India will hit rock bottom due to improper waste management.

Solid-Wastes-Management-India

Unfortunately, they think such a crisis is required to bring about policy changes, as they generally tend to happen only after the damage has been done. This attitude is unfortunate because it indicates a lack of or failed effort from the sector to change policy, and also the level of India’s planning and preparedness.

Important Statistics

An average of 32,000 people will be added to urban India every day, continuously, until 2021. This number is a warning, considering how India’s waste management infrastructure went berserk trying to deal with just 25,000 new urban Indians during the last decade. The scale of urbanization in India and around the world is unprecedented with planetary consequences to Earth’s limited material and energy resources, and its natural balance.

Rate of increase in access to sanitation infrastructure generally lags behind the rate of urbanization by 33% around the world; however, the lack of planning and impromptu piecemeal responses to waste management issues observed in India might indicate a much wider gap. This means urban Indians will have to wait longer than an average urban citizen of our world for access to better waste management infrastructure.

The clear trend in the outbreak of epidemic and public protests around India is that they are happening in the biggest cities in their respective regions. Kolkata, Bengaluru, Thiruvananthapuram, and Srinagar are capitals of their respective states, and Coimbatore is the second largest city in Tamil Nadu. However, long term national level plans to improve waste management in India do not exist and guidance offered to urban local bodies is meager.

Apart from the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM), there has been no national level effort required to address the problem. Even though JnNURM was phenomenal in stimulating the industry and local governments, it was not enough to address the scale and extent of the problem. This is because of JnNURM is not a long term financing program, sorts of which are required to tackle issues like solid waste management.

Role of Municipal Corporations

In the short term, municipal corporations have their hands tied and will not be able to deliver solutions immediately. They face the task of realizing waste management facilities inside or near cities while none of their citizens want them near their residences. Officials of Hyderabad’s municipal corporation have been conducting interviews with locals for about eight years now for a new landfill site, to no avail.

In spite of the mounting pressure, most corporations will not be able to close the dumpsites that they are currently using. This might not be the good news for which local residents could be waiting, but, it is important that bureaucrats, municipal officials and politicians be clear about it. Residents near Vellalore dump protested and blocked roads leading to the site because Coimbatore municipal officials repeatedly failed to fulfill their promises after every landfill fire incident.

Due to lack of existing alternatives, other than diverting waste fractionally by increasing informal recycling sector’s role, closing existing landfills would mean finding new sites. Finding new landfills in and around cities is nearly impossible because of the track record of dumpsite operations and maintenance in India and the Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon.

However, the corporations can and should take measures to reduce landfill fires and open burning, and control pollution due to leachate and odor and vector nuisance. This will provide much needed relief to adjacent communities and give the corporations time to plan better. While navigating through an issue as sensitive this, it is of the utmost importance that they work closely with the community by increasing clarity and transparency.

Municipal officials at the meeting repeatedly stressed the issue of scarcity of land for waste disposal, which led to overflowing dumpsites and waste treatment facilities receiving more waste than what they were designed for. Most municipal officials are of the sense that a magic solution is right around the corner which will turn all of their city’s waste into fuel oil or gas, or into recycled products.

While such conversion is technologically possible with infinite energy and financial sources, that is not the reality. Despite their inability to properly manage wastes, the majority of municipal officials consider waste as “wealth” when approached by private partners. Therefore, a significant portion of officials expect royalty from private investments without sharing business risk.

waste-mountain

The increasing cost of waste disposal is a cause of major concern in developing nations

Good News on the Horizon

While the situation across India is grim and official action has to be demanded through courts or public protests, there are a handful of local governments which are planning ahead and leading the way. The steps taken to solve New Delhi’s waste management problem is laudable. If it was not for the kind of leadership and determination showcased in Delhi, India would not have had its only operating WTE plant. This plant was built in 2011, at a time when the need for waste-to-energy plants was being felt all over India. 1300 tons of Delhi’s waste goes into this facility every day to generate electricity. The successful operation of this facility reinvigorated dormant projects across the nation.

After living with heaps of garbage for months, Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation started penalizing institutions which dump their waste openly. It has also increased the subsidy on the cost of small scale biogas units to 75% and aerobic composting units to 90% to encourage decentralized waste management. The corporation is optimistic with the increase in number of applications for the subsidy from 10 in an entire year to 18 in just a few months after the announcement.

In Bengaluru, improper waste management led to the change of the city’s municipal commissioner. The new commissioner was handed over the job to particularly improve waste management in the city. As a response to the dengue outbreak in Kolkata, the state’s Chief Minister went door to door to create awareness about waste management, and also included the topic in her public speeches. For good or bad, many cities in India have started or initiated steps for banning plastics without performing life cycle analyses.

3 Ways to Effectively Manage Your Medical Waste

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All of the items that are used in healthcare must be disposed of correctly in a way that is environmentally safe and also responsible. This includes syringes, needles, and expired pills.

There are a lot of used syringes, dirty needles, pharmaceutical waste such as expired or contaminated drugs, and even infectious waste such as blood, used dressings, bacterial cultures and wastes from accelerated clinical trials. Of course, all these things pose massive health and contamination risks and if they’re not disposed of properly, they can lead to even bigger health and environmental risks.

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Luckily, we have some information that will undoubtedly help you. Here are three effective ways to manage your medical waste.

1. Correct disposal

Correct disposal means everything when it comes to keeping our environment safe and healthy, which is our priority. Before items are disposed of, they must go through a thorough treatment process to minimise health threats and reduce damage to our environment.

The terms of treatment realistically depend on the facilities, but the most common terms of medical waste treatment are:

  • Steam sterilisation: A great decontamination method that is simple but highly effective. Pressurised steam operates at a high temperature and kills off microorganisms.
  • Mechanical treatment: Grinding/shredding.
  • Chemical treatment: The use of disinfectants.

It is of the utmost importance that all staff are educated on the significance of disposal of medical waste correctly.

2. Develop a plan

Developing a plan could be considered one of the most important things when it comes to the management of medical waste. Every great facility will have an effective and proper plan in place regarding the management of their medical waste. The responsibilities and roles of each member as well as the waste management plan should be laid out as soon as possible with hospitals and will usually be the first thing you learn.

biomedical-waste

It is also of great importance that every staff member understands knows how much waste is generated and to what extent it does or does not fluctuate. It is up to the hospital to effectively teach this to their staff.

3. Introduce reusable items

Surprisingly, one of the worst ways to deal with waste items is to dispose of them. The most effective way to avoid waste is to not produce it in the first place. Understandably, waste is unavoidable in some circumstances, however, where possible it should be avoided.

A big way to make a change is to make the switch to reusable products where it is possible. Opting for greener alternatives could make the biggest difference to the environment and hospitals themselves. It is insanely easy to use reusable items in hospitals and it will be a godsend to the environment should hospitals consider reusable items.

In some cases, hospitals already use reusable products but for the sake of patient safety, some things just simply can’t be reusable. For example, any sharps containers and some specific medical instruments can actually be reusable! They will simply need to be sanitised and disinfected before/after each use and voila!

Before buying a product, it is always a good idea to check if it may be reusable. This will not only save money, but it will also save medical waste.

It is important to take care when disposing of your medical waste, see how to do it here.

How to Improve the Efficiency of Business Waste Management

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When you consider any macro-level activity, every small step counts. The same is true for waste management too. You can reduce the amount of waste reaching the landfill if you can encourage the best practices for your establishment.

The increased amount of waste disposal, mishandling of the waste, or ill-treatment of the discarded waste lead to many complexities for us. The air we breathe in or the water available to drink gets contaminated because of such activities.

California is home to thriving startup culture. There are several offices from Silicon Valley to San Jose. Waste disposal and treatment becomes specifically crucial for such an area. Improper business waste management can not only affect the surface but contaminate the air too.

This article highlights the various ways you can increase the efficiency of business waste management initiatives to cut down such an impact on the environment.

ways you can increase the efficiency of your waste management initiatives

1. Quantifying the Generated Waste

The first step for any waste management activity is assessing the waste. A quick visual waste assessment can help you understand the amount of waste present in the bins before collection.

It is ideal to opt for the various sizes of the bins to address the different quantities of waste generated from your business premises. You can define the system’s efficiency by tracking how often the waste collection bins get full or the collection intervals.

You may have a standard 240 L bin to collect all the waste generated from your office. If you observe that the bins get 75% filled and the collection happens once every week, it translates to your premise generating around 180 L of waste every week.

Once such information is available, you can ideate how much waste your business will produce for a given period.

2. Reduction of Waste Going Out

When you consider the waste management of a particular area, you need to keep track of the local happenings that impact the environment. The latest wildfire in San Jose, California, led to an aggravation of the level of pollutants in the air of the local area.

Being a resident of such a place or having your business premises at such a location needs higher awareness. Checking the air quality in San Jose can be your first step to understanding the prevailing conditions.

You can get an idea of the air quality that you have an office in by checking online, but it is crucial to maintain and keep the pollutant levels low. It often happens that the waste effervesces gases in the atmosphere. You should ensure a reduction of the waste going out of your premises to landfills to curb the escaping gases that it can contribute to later.

For this, you can pursue:

  • Reduction – can you avoid or reduce the waste your business generates by its operation?
  • Reusing – can your waste serve as the input material for another local industry?
  • Recycling – what are the materials that you can keep in the list of recyclables?

3. Identifying a Well-Equipped Local Collector

Once you have a quantity of waste that your business generates in the datasheet and the options to reduce the generated waste, you can identify the ideal local waste collector for your establishment.

waste reduction in businesses

Identifying a suitable recycling and collection contact is crucial for your business. Although, the California startup culture warrants driving the business growth and not indulging in how the waste gets disposed of after collection. You need to identify a well-equipped California collector with a facility to properly ensure measures to treat the waste that you are asking him to collect from your premises.

4. Keeping Efficiency at the Core of Waste Management Contract

When drafting the recycling and waste collection contract with your local vendor, you should delve deeper and understand its key nuances. Do your research to understand what part of the waste that your establishment generates can be recycled.

If the collection happens once a fortnight, you should have proper bins to stop the waste from disturbing the surroundings. You can increase the efficiency of the waste management techniques by writing the effective ways of waste management in the proposal document.

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You can also define the key here is where your waste can get disposed of and how you want it to undergo treatment. You should always keep in mind that the recycling contract is legally bound. Therefore, the contract should have well-defined catchment areas putting forth the scope of work of the contractor.

You can review the offers of all the California contractors who meet your criteria. You should look at the condition of the facilities in which your waste will get processed. Although the above is not an exhaustive list, these can increase the waste management contract’s efficiency.

Waste Management Outlook for Nigeria

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Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa with population exceeding 182 million people, is grappling with waste management issues. The country generates around 43.2 million tonnes of waste annually. By 2025 with a population of 233.5 million, Nigeria will be generating an estimated 72.46 million tonnes of waste annually at a projected rate of 0.85 kg of waste/capita/day. This means that Nigeria annual waste generation will almost equal its crude oil production which currently stands at approximately 89.63 million tonnes per year.

waste-nigeria

Also, at an estimated annual waste generation figure of 72.46 million tonnes, Nigeria will be generating about one-fourth of the total waste that will be produced in the whole of Africa. This is scary and if proper attention is not paid to this enormous challenge, Nigeria might become the “Waste Capital of Africa”.

Waste is a Resource for Nigeria

Nonetheless, this challenge can be turned into a blessing because waste is a resource in disguise. If its potential is properly tapped, waste management can create employment, enable power generation, create a waste-based economy and contribute to economic diversification which Nigeria. There is no doubt that this is achievable because we have examples of countries already utilizing their waste judiciously.

Some good examples of sustainable waste management systems that can be implemented in Nigeria includes

  1. Shanghai (China) which turn 50% of the generated waste into power generation electrifying 100,000 homes;
  2. Incheon (South Korea) where its Sudokwon landfill receives about 20,000 tons of waste daily which is converted into electric power, has a water recycling and desalination facility, and has created more than 200 jobs;
  3. Los Angeles (USA) which produces electric power enough for 70,000 homes in its Puente Hills landfill;
  4. Germany whose sophisticated waste processing systems through recycling, composting, and energy generation has already saved the country 20% of the cost of metals and 3% of the cost of energy imports;
  5. Austria, though a small country, is doing big things in waste management especially through recycling;
  6. Sweden, whose recycling is so revolutionary that the country had to import waste; and
  7. Flanders, Belgium which possesses the best waste diversion rate in Europe with 75% of their waste being reused, recycled or composted. An interesting fact is that per capita waste generation rate in Flanders is more than twice that of Nigeria at 1.5 kg/day.

Waste Management Outlook for Nigeria

Below are some of the major things the government need to do to judiciously utilize the free and abundant resource available in the form of trash in Nigeria:

Firstly, attention needs to be paid to building the human resource potential of the country to build the required capacity in conceptualizing fit-for-purpose innovative solution to be deployed in tackling and solving the waste challenge.

While knowledge exchange/transfer through international public private partnership is a possible way in providing waste management solution, it is not sustainable for the country especially because there is already an unemployment problem in Nigeria. Hence, funding the training of interested and passionate individuals and entrepreneurs in waste management is a better way of tackling the waste crisis in Nigeria.

Olusosun is the largest dumpsite in Nigeria

The Federal Government through the Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF) and National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) of the Ministry of Communication currently sponsor students to study oil and gas as well as information technology related subjects in foreign countries in the hope of boosting manpower in both sectors of the economy. The same approach should be used in the waste management sector and this can be handled through the Federal Ministry of Environment.

Interestingly, waste generation is almost at par with crude oil production in Nigeria. Therefore, equal attention should be paid to waste-to-wealth sector. Needless to say, this is important as there is no university in Nigeria currently offering waste management as a stand-alone course either at undergraduate or postgraduate level.

The Rationale for National Waste Strategy

Secondly, there is an urgent need for a strong National Waste Management Strategy to checkmate the different types of waste that enters the country’s waste stream as well as the quantity of waste being produced. To develop an effective national waste strategy, a study should be carried out to understand the country’s current stream of waste, generation pattern, and existing management approach. This should be championed by the Federal Ministry of Environment in conjunction with State and Local Government waste management authorities.

Once this is done, each State of the Federation will now integrate their own individual State Waste Management Plan into that of the Federal Government to achieve a holistic waste management development in Nigeria. By so doing, the government would also contribute to climate change mitigation because the methane produced when waste degrades is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas known to many and contributor to global warming).

The Need for Financial Incentives

Finally, the government needs to support existing waste management initiatives either through tax-holiday on major equipment that need to be imported for their work and/or on their operation for a certain period of time. Also, if workable, the government can float a grant for innovative ideas and provide liberal subsidies in waste management to jumpstart the growth of the sector.

Lastly, the Government of Nigeria can raise a delegation of experts, entrepreneurs, industry professionals, academia, and youngsters to visit countries with sound waste management strategy for knowledge sharing, capacity-building, technology transfer and first-hand experience.

Note: The unedited version of the article can be found at this link