Think about this for a moment… over 1.6 billion tons of solid waste end up in landfills each year around the world. 1.6 billion tons per year is 52 tons per second. Reasonable people can disagree on the short and long term effects of landfilling, but no one can argue with the fact that waste is a big problem and it’s getting bigger, especially since landfills emit significant greenhouse gases.
Roughly half of the air emissions from landfills come from methane, a greenhouse gas that is 22-times more harmful than carbon dioxide. In the U.S. alone, methane from landfills leads to 125 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year, one of the largest man-made sources of methane emissions. This problem is compounded by the other environmental problems that landfilling helps create: groundwater pollution, odor, rodents, disease, and urban blight. So the need to reduce the impact of landfills is real and needs attention.
Appropriately, the environmental community has consistently advocated for using a three “R” hierarchy when it comes with minimizing and managing waste:
- Reduce >>> Anyone that has recently bought a toy, a cell phone, a container of pre-washed lettuce, or anything that arrives in a box cannot help but notice the extra waste bound up in the wrapping and packaging, much of which ends up in a landfill. In fact, product packaging accounts for about 1/3 of all consumer trash thrown away in the U.S.
- Re-use >>> While slightly less desirable than reducing waste outright, re-using things we already own is the next step. We reuse shopping bags, food containers, and zip-lock bags. We reuse plastic bottles when we are desperate. Yet many people struggle to expand the list. Do left overs count? The propane tank? Even with the best intentions, much of what we buy isn’t designed for re-use which presents a challenge.
- Re-cycle >>> Even though recycling is at the bottom of the desired hierarchy, it seems to get the most attention, and by many measures has been the most successful. In the U.S. we recycle about 33% of our waste and everyone in the supply chain, from producers to consumers, has a heightened sense of awareness about the benefits of recycling.
The current thinking on sustainability dictates that as long as we are making progress toward increasing the three ‘R’s in everything we do, we will reduce landfill waste. However, this approach has one inconvenient truth – while the rate of recycling increases every year, curiously, so too does the overall amount of waste going to landfills.
How is this possible? The simple answer is that there are more people, and more people translate into more waste. A more complete answer is that our myopic focus on recycling obscures the economy’s strong motivation to produce and sell more products. So while consumers of goods get marginally better at putting everything in the proper recycle bin, producers of goods — everything from patio furniture to children’s apparel — have a strong economic motivation to sell more stuff. Winning the volume war almost always means sacrificing quality in favor of low cost. When producers of goods compete on price, the consumer wins by getting low-cost goods, yet lose because low-cost/low-quality goods tend to quickly fall apart and end up in a landfill. So, we are all losing from a climate-change perspective when you consider the carbon life-cycle of the goods we buy.
Given this predicament, we must rethink how we manage waste. It seems appropriate to question whether our current system of waste resolution is the best we can do. We can and will do better, but not without some profound changes. Here are three simple ideas:
- For Consumers – buy less stuff and insist on higher quality. In doing so, you will exert pressure on manufacturers to produce better quality materials which will actually cost you less in the long run. If you cannot afford to buy something that will last, consider saving for it until you can afford it.
- For Producers – design and manufacture products with the end in mind, as if you were going to be responsible for the final resting place of your products. If for no other reason, this may soon be the case.
- For Environmentalists – waste began as a pollution problem. Now it is a climate change problem as well. This requires a new framework of collaborative thinking, as well as incentives and penalties in order to bring about more effective results. Consider advocating for more producer responsibilities at the front end to combat the waste creation problem and encouraging development of advanced technologies at the back end to minimize the disposal problem.
As with everything else involving climate change, this isn’t going to be an easy problem to solve. Certainly not with more of the same thinking that got us here. The problem with waste, as Edward McBride of The Economist recently noted, is that by definition no one wants to think about it.
In our view, this is exactly the moment we must think about it.
