Zero Waste

Zero Waste is defined as "The conservation of all resources by means of responsible production, consumption, reuse, and recovery of products, packaging, and materials without burning and with no discharges to land, water, or air that threaten the environment or human health.” It's not a utopic idea, but a set of policies and practices intended to eliminate incineration and reduce waste as much as possible, ultimately achieving at least 90% reduction of waste going to disposal.
Zero Waste Hierarchy:

Redesign
Reduce
Source Separate: (reusables, recycling, composting and trash)

• Reuse / Repair
• Recycle (multi-stream) ⇒ Material Recovery Facility (MRF)
• Compost ⇒ aerobically compost clean organic materials like food scraps and yard waste to return to soils
• Waste:
  • Waste Composition Research (examine trash to see how the system can be improved upstream)
  • Material Recovery (mechanically remove additional recyclables that people failed to separate)
  • Biological Treatment (aerobic composting -- or, better yet, anaerobic digestion followed by aerobic composting -- of organic residuals to stabilize them)
  • Stabilized Landfilling (biological treatment reduces volume and avoids gas and odor problems)

The official Zero Waste definition and Zero Waste Hierarchy are policies we helped the Zero Waste International Alliance develop. See our more detailed zero waste hierarchy.

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Story of Stuff (excellent short, fun film on how materials move through our economy, from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to waste):

Getting the back end of the zero waste hierarchy right:

• Eco-Cycle's What is the best disposal option for the "Leftovers" on the way to Zero Waste? (Full Report in PDF)
  
  
• Mechanical and Biological Treatment (MBT) (2008 briefing by Friends of the Earth UK) - excellent overview of the pitfalls of MBT

The Zero Waste Solution - Untrashing the Planet One Community at a Time, by Paul Connett

Resources on the problems with incinerators and landfills:

• Incineration
• Landfills
• Beyond Landfilling
• Landfill gas

Zero Waste Plans:

• Austin, TX: In December 2011, Austin adopted an excellent Zero Waste master plan to put them on the same path that cities like San Francisco have been pursuing. They found this plan to make economic sense even though landfilling in the area is dirty cheap, at $20/ton! If Austin can do it, any city can.
  
  The Austin Zero Waste plan aims for diverting the following percentages of discarded materials from incinerators and landfills:
  50% in 2015
  75% in 2020
  85% in 2025
  90% in 2030
  95%+ in 2040
  
  Austin's Zero Waste master plan: main webpage, Master Plan (321 pages - 37 MB PDF), Summary (25 pages - 28 MB PDF)
  
• San Francisco Zero Waste plan
• Alameda County, CA: Policy Tools & Model Ordinances for Local Governments
• Oakland, CA zero waste plan
  
• Maryland is working on a statewide zero waste plan, but seems to think that incineration is a needed step along the way, as they've concocted a non-existent landfill space crisis. See their draft plan and our comments.

Other major resources on zero waste:

• Zero Waste International Alliance
• Grassroots Recycling Network
• Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR is great at helping put together alternative economic plans based on recycling and composting)

Job creation:
A zero waste program should include a number of tactics that increase material reuse, recycling and composting. Doing so has great job creation potential: about 5 to 10 times more jobs than landfilling or incineration.

• Pay Dirt: Composting in Maryland to Reduce Waste, Create Jobs, & Protect the Bay (2013 ILSR report)
• A national 75% recycling goal would create 1.5 million new jobs, according to the November 2011 Tellus report (in conjunction with the Teamsters union, SEIU, Blue Green Alliance, and environmental groups):
  
  • Recycling Works Campaign
  • More Jobs, Less Pollution: Growing the Recycling Economy in the U.S.
• Recycling produces 10 times more jobs than incineration or landfilling:
  http://www.ilsr.org/recycling-means-business/
  That chart, and another more visually appealing one of the same, are in this Powerpoint presentation on incineration: http://www.energyjustice.net/files/incineration/incineration.pdf Slides 33 and 34 came from GAIA reports Waste Incineration: A Dying Technology Report (p30) and An Industry Blowing Smoke: 10 Reasons Why Gasification, Pyrolysis & Plasma Incineration are Not "Green Solutions" (p27)
• As You Sow's 2012 report "Unfinished Business: The Case for Extended Producer Responsibility" found that $11.4 billion worth of recyclable packaging wasted (sent to landfills and incinerators) in 2010. (short video summary, full report, executive summary)
• And, oddly... cardboard theft:
  • The lucrative crime of cardboard theft (8/6/2012 Marketplace interview)
    
  • Inside the Surprisingly Lucrative World of Cardboard Theft (7/31/2012 article in The Atlantic)
    
    From the "Atlantic" article:
    "It may sound like a tedious way to earn a living, but it's quite suitable for folks who like a good workout and fast payouts. "You rent a van and drive down Second Avenue [in Manhattan] or Atlantic in Brooklyn, you pick up a ton and a half of cardboard and get paid 150 bucks for it," says Biderman. "Do that twice a night and you're doing OK."
    
    You could burn that one-and-a-half ton of cardboard (in a $500 million plant) to generate 2.8 megawatt hours of electricity with a market value of about $98.
    
    Interestingly, in the interview, the author says this:
    
    "Metcalfe: Anyone basically who wants to rent a van or a truck can just do that and then drive down, say, Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn at night and just throw in cardboard in the back of their truck. You can make $1,000 that way in one night."
    
    That's quite different from the other quote in the written article. Both may be correct depending on how many trips they do in a night, and where the fluctuating price of cardboard is at the moment.

• Container-deposit programs (bottle bills) produce 8 jobs per 1,000 tons recycled.
• Washington State and Oregon's electronic-waste producer take-back recycling programs have resulted in 360 new jobs to the region.
• British Columbia, a Canadian province of 4.4 million people, reports that eight of their producer take-back programs have created more than 2,100 new jobs.
• Germany's packaging producer take-back law generates more than 17,000 jobs.