Tag Archives: Sustainable Waste Management

A Guide to Sustainable Waste Management for Businesses

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There are many reasons to adopt sustainability as your main guiding policy in conducting business. With environmental problems becoming more prevalent worldwide, consumers seem to show a strong preference for businesses that adhere to environmental ethics. A sustainable business strategy can thus give you an edge over competitors. But business sustainability is tightly connected to waste management because any business activity generates waste that can harm the environment.

In this article, you’ll discover a detailed guide to sustainable waste management for businesses that want to build an eco-friendly identity.

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Identify Wasteful Activities

Whether you deliver products or services, analyze your business practices and determine what activities produce the largest amounts of waste. Most importantly, determine whether these waste-generating activities can be avoided or reduced. For example, paper consumption in offices is often wasteful and can be easily reduced by avoiding unnecessary printing and copying and working predominantly with electronic files.

So, identify all wasteful activities in your company. Then implement a series of rules to avoid these activities or reduce their recurrence. Much better than implementing a sustainable waste management system is not to generate waste at all.

Reuse, Recycle or Donate

Pay attention to the waste generated in your company and determine which items or components can be reused, recycled, or donated. In many cases, what you consider waste can find an application elsewhere.  Good waste management involves foremost an assessment of whether an item has lost all functional and practical purposes or is fit for other uses inside your company or elsewhere.

Always consider reusing items that haven’t lost their properties or features. Instruct employees to recycle. Add bins in the office for materials such as paper, cardboard, plastic, glass, or aluminum. Never send electronics, office equipment, furniture, or tools to the landfill. Either send them to a recycling facility or donate them to a charity.

Create a Disposal Plan

It’s almost impossible to avoid all waste since even raw materials and supplies can turn into waste due to being contaminated or damaged. This is why you need a waste disposal plan that it’s either dangerous to keep on your premises or cannot be recycled. For example, old and unused fuels can become contaminated and require removal from a specialized service.

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To maintain a clean, healthy, and safe environment for your employees and customers, create a disposal plan for each type of waste. Ideally, only biodegradable waste should go to the landfill.

Conclusion

Although a business can find it difficult not to generate waste, it’s important to develop a waste management system that takes into consideration environmental concerns. Businesses need raw materials, supplies, tools, electronics, and various equipment to function properly. They also need energy, electricity, and water. And because businesses consume so many tangible and intangible resources, governments and customers expect them to show a sense of responsibility for the environment.

By adopting a sustainable waste management system, you demonstrate an ethical, future-oriented business approach. Perform a waste audit and use the tips above to set waste-minimization goals for your business.

Rationale for Solid Waste Management

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Some countries have achieved considerable success in solid waste management. But the rest of the world is grappling to deal with its wastes. In these places, improper management of solid waste continues to impact public health of entire communities and cities; pollute local water, air and land resources; contribute to climate change and ocean plastic pollution; hinder climate change adaptation; and accelerate depletion of forests and mines.

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Compared to solid waste management, we can consider that the world has achieved significant success in providing other basic necessities like food, drinking water, energy and economic opportunities. Managing solid wastes properly can help improve the above services further.

Composting of organic waste can help nurture crops and result in a better agricultural yield. Reducing landfilling and building sanitary landfills will reduce ground and surface water pollution which can help provide cleaner drinking water. Energy recovery from non-recyclable wastes can satiate significant portion of a city’s energy requirement.

Inclusive waste management where informal waste recyclers are involved can provide an enormous economic opportunity to the marginalized urban poor. Additionally, a good solid waste management plan with cost recovery mechanisms can free tax payers money for other issues. In the case of India, sustainable solid waste management in 2011 would have provided

  • 9.6 million tons of compost that could have resulted in a better agricultural yield
  • energy equivalent to 58 million barrels of oil from non-recyclable wastes
  • 6.7 million tons of secondary raw materials to industries in the form of recyclable materials and livelihood to the urban poor

Solid waste management until now has only been a social responsibility of the corporate world or one of the services to be provided by the municipality and a non-priority for national governments. However, in Mumbai, the improperly managed wastes generate 22,000 tons of toxic pollutants like particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrous and sulfur oxides in addition to 10,000 grams of carcinogenic dioxins and furans every year. These numbers are only for the city of Mumbai. This is the case in cities all across the developing world. There are numerous examples where groundwater is polluted by heavy metals and organic contaminants due to solid waste landfills.

Solid waste management expenditure of above $ 1 billion per year competes with education, poverty, security and other sustainable initiatives in New York City. Fossil fuels for above 500,000 truck trips covering hundreds of miles are required to transport NYC’s waste to landfills outside the city and state. Similarly, New Delhi spends more than half of its entire municipal budget on solid waste management, while it is desperate for investments and maintenance of roads, buildings, and other infrastructure.

Solid waste management is not just a corporate social responsibility or a non-priority service anymore. Improper waste management is a public health and environmental crisis, economic loss, operational inefficiency and political and public awareness failure. Integrated solid waste management can be a nation building exercise for healthier and wealthier communities. Therefore, it needs global attention to arrive at solutions which span across such a wide range of issues.