WASTED AWAY AGAIN IN MARGA-RECYCLE-VILLE
We Can Reduce Waste with a New Materials Economy

Waste takes many forms—mountains of garbage, inefficient use of material resources, extravagant use of energy. A strong economy need not be wasteful—we can reduce waste and have a prosperous future. In fact, given the limitations of a finite planet, reducing waste may be the only way the future can be prosperous.

REDUCE WASTE

Laying the Groundwork

The potential for reducing materials use has been examined over the last decade in three specific studies. The first—Factor Four, by Ernst von Weizsäcker, an environmentalist and leader in the German Bundestag—argued that modern industrial economies could function very effectively with a level of virgin raw material use only one fourth that of today.

This was followed a few years later by research from the Factor Ten Institute, based in France under the leadership of Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek. It concluded that resource productivity can be raised by a factor of 10 and that this is well within the reach of existing technology and management—given appropriate policy incentives.

In 2002, American architect William McDonough and German chemist Michael Braungart teamed up to coauthor a book entitled Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. Waste and pollution are to be avoided at any cost. "Pollution," says McDonough, "is a symbol of design failure." If manufacturing processes are designed so they interlock, any unavoidable waste from one process serves as a valuable input to another.

REDUCE WASTE BY RECYCLING
Steel — A Waste Reduction Success Story

One of the keys to reducing materials use is recycling steel, the use of which dwarfs that of all other metals combined. Steel use is dominated by the automobile, household-appliance, and construction industries. Among steel-based products in the United States, automobiles are the most highly recycled. Cars today are simply too valuable to be left to rust in out-of-the-way junkyards.

The recycling rate for household appliances is estimated at 90%. For steel cans, the US recycling rate this decade of 60% can be traced in part to municipal recycling campaigns launched in the late 1980s.

In the United States, roughly 71% of all steel produced in 2003 was from scrap, leaving 29% to be produced from virgin ore. Steel recycling started climbing more than a generation ago with the advent of the electric arc furnace, a method of producing steel from scrap that uses only one third the energy required to produce steel from virgin ore. And since it does not require any mining, it completely eliminates one source of environmental disruption. In the United States, Italy, and Spain, electric arc furnaces used for recycling now account for half or more of all steel production.

Because the amount of steel embedded in a mature industrial economy is essentially fixed—the number of household appliances, automobiles, and buildings is increasing little—it is easier for these economies to get most of their steel from recycled scrap. For countries in the early stages of industrialization, however, the creation of new infrastructure products—factories, bridges, high-rise buildings, automobiles, buses, rail cars—leaves little steel for recycling.

In the new economy, electric-arc steel "mini-mills" that efficiently convert scrap steel into finished steel will largely replace iron mines. Advanced industrial economies will come to rely primarily on the stock of materials already in the economy rather than on virgin raw materials. For metals such as steel and aluminum, losses through use will be minimal. With the appropriate policies, metal can be used and reused indefinitely.

REDUCE WASTE BY DESIGNING
3D Products — Deconstruct, Disassemble, Divert

In recent years, the construction industry has begun deconstructing old buildings, breaking them down into their component parts so they can be recycled and reused. For example, when PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh took down a seven-story downtown building, the principal products were 2,500 tons of concrete, 350 tons of steel, 9 tons of aluminum, and foam ceiling tiles. The concrete was pulverized and used to fill in the site, which is to become a park. The steel and aluminum were recycled. And the ceiling tiles went back to the manufacturer to be recycled. This recycling saved some $200,000 in dump fees. By deconstructing a building instead of simply demolishing it, most of the material in it can be recycled.

Germany and, more recently, Japan are requiring that products such as automobiles, household appliances, and office equipment be designed so that they can be easily disassembled and their component parts recycled. In May 2001, the Japanese Diet enacted a tough appliance recycling law, one that prohibits discarding household appliances, such as washing machines, televisions, or air conditioners. With consumers bearing the cost of disassembling appliances in the form of a disposal fee to recycling firms, which can come to $60 for a refrigerator or $35 for a washing machine, the pressure to design appliances so they can be more easily and cheaply disassembled is strong.

REDUCE WASTE

Reuse Reduces Waste Compared to Recycling

Beyond measures that encourage the recycling of materials are those that encourage the reuse of products such as beverage containers. Finland, for example, has banned the use of one-way soft drink containers. Canada's Prince Edward Island has adopted a similar ban on all non-refillable beverage containers. The result in both cases is a sharply reduced flow of garbage to landfills.

A refillable glass bottle used over and over requires about 10% as much energy per use as an aluminum can that is recycled. Cleaning, sterilizing, and relabeling a used bottle requires little energy, but recycling cans made from aluminum, which has a melting point of 660 degrees Celsius (1,220 degrees Fahrenheit), is an energy-intensive process. Banning non-refillables is a win-win-win option--cutting material and energy use, garbage flow, and air and water pollution.

REDUCE WASTE BY
Redesigning Manufacturing Processes

Even more fundamental than the design of products is the redesign of manufacturing processes to eliminate the discharge of pollutants entirely. Many of today's manufacturing processes evolved at a time when the economy was much smaller and when the volume of pollutants was not overwhelming the ecosystem. More and more companies are now realizing that this cannot continue and some, such as DuPont, have adopted zero emissions as a goal.

REDUCE WASTE BY
Reducing Waste by Changing Paradigms

Steering Progress

Government procurement policies can be used to dramatically boost recycling. For example, when the Clinton administration issued an Executive Order in 1993 requiring that all government-purchased paper contain 20% or more "post-consumer content" by 1995 (increasing to 25% by 2000), it created a strong incentive for paper manufacturers to incorporate wastepaper in their manufacturing process. Since the U.S. government is the world's largest paper buyer, this provided a burgeoning market for recycled paper.

Leap-Frogging Technologies

New technologies that are less material-dependent also reduce materials use. Cellular phones, which rely on widely dispersed towers or on satellites for signal transmission, now totally dominate telephone use in developing countries, thus sparing them the investment in the millions of miles of copper wires that had to be made by countries that industrialized in an earlier era.

Bottled Water Blues

One industry whose value to society is being questioned by the environmental community is the bottled water industry. The World Wide Fund for Nature, an organization with 5.2 million members, released a study in 2001 urging consumers in industrial countries to forgo bottled water, observing that it was no safer or healthier than tap water, even though it can cost 1,000 times as much.

WWF notes that in the United States and Europe there are more standards regulating the quality of tap water than of bottled water. Although clever marketing in industrial countries has convinced many consumers that bottled water is healthier, the WWF study could not find any scientific support for this claim. For those living where water is unsafe, as in some Third World cities, it is far cheaper to boil or filter water than to buy it in bottles.

Phasing out the use of bottled water would eliminate the need for billions of plastic bottles and the fleets of trucks that haul and distribute the water. This in turn would eliminate the traffic congestion, air pollution, and rising carbon dioxide levels from operating the trucks.

Gold Jewelry — Ego, not Eco

A brief review of the environmental effects of gold mining raises doubts about whether the industry is a net benefit to society. In addition to the extensive release of mercury and cyanide into the environment, annual gold production of 2,500 tons requires the processing of 750 million tons of ore—second only to the 2.5 billion tons of ore processed to produce 1 billion tons of raw steel.

To set an honest market price for gold would mean imposing a tax on it that would cover the cost of cleaning up the mercury and cyanide pollution from mining plus the costs of landscape restoration in mining regions. Such a tax, which would enable the price of this precious metal to reflect its full cost to society, would likely raise its price severalfold.

Sin Subsidies and Carbon Taxes

Another option for reducing the use of raw materials would be to eliminate subsidies that encourage their use. Nowhere are these greater than in the aluminum industry. For example, a study by the Australia Institute reports that smelters in Australia buy electricity at an astoundingly low subsidized rate of 0.7 to 1.4 cents per kilowatt-hour, while other industries pay 2.6 to 3.1 cents. Without this huge subsidy, non-refillable aluminum beverage containers might not be cost-competitive. This subsidy to aluminum also indirectly subsidizes both airlines and automobiles, thus encouraging travel, an energy-intensive activity.

The most pervasive policy initiative to lower material use in the economy is the proposed tax on the burning of fossil fuels, a tax that would reflect the full cost to society of mining coal and pumping oil, of the air pollution associated with their use, and of climate disruption from their associated greenhouse-gas emissions. A carbon tax will lead to a more realistic energy price, one that will permeate the energy-intensive materials economy and reduce materials use. (Related Lester Brown article: Tax Shifting.)

REDUCE WASTE

Wrap-Up

The challenge in building an environmentally and economically sustainable materials sector is to ensure that the market is sending honest signals. In the words of Ernst von Weizsäcker, "The challenge is to get the market to tell the ecological truth." To help the market to tell the truth, we need not only a carbon tax, but also a landfill tax so that those generating garbage pay the full cost of getting rid of it and product manufacturers are properly incentivized to reduce waste in the first place.

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Cradle to Cradle:
Remaking the Way We Make Things

Today's "cradle to grave" manufacturing model dates back to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. The authors argue that products and processes should be designed so that wastes and worn-out products serve as useful manufacturing inputs, not trash and pollution.

"Good house keeping practices in industries can reduce 30% of waste and thereby 30% of the cost of waste management."

— Sumith Pilapitiya

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True to Yourself:
Leading a Values-based Business

Many leaders of small businesses want to serve the common good, but everyday pressures can make that extremely difficult. What tools are available to lead an organization that's obligated to more than the financial bottom line? True to Yourself provides potent, practical advice for leaders looking to make their small business profitable and sustainable.

ANIMATION / VIDEO
RELATED TO
Reducing Waste

THE STORY OF STUFF — In this 20-minute Flash video/animation, Annie Leonard tells us the Story of Stuff---how consumer goods get made and disposed of. She visually narrates the tale with fun, quirky graphics that help illustrate concepts and keep our brains plugged in. Her goal is to disabuse us of the mantra "I shop, therefore I am," highlighting the negatives that go with our consumeristic culture: resource extraction and environmental degradation; chemicals and body burden; even personal unhappiness. At the end of the clip, we hear about a few sustainable solutions, and the companion web site continues on in that vein. Leonard occasionally exaggerates, and a few of her specifics are a bit off, but the general charges here are right on. Animation by FreeRangeGraphics. Go there