Dear “Earth Talk”: Can you explain the
“zero waste” movement in Europe, Australia and elsewhere that
goes beyond recycling to reduce waste? How can we make it happen here in
the United States? — Neil Weiss, Methuen, Mass.
In essence, “zero waste” is a design
principle writ large, whereby products are conceived, produced, packaged,
distributed, and retired with their long-term environmental impacts in
mind. According to the nonprofit GrassRoots Recycling Network, “Zero
waste maximizes recycling, minimizes waste, reduces consumption, and
ensures that products are made to be reused, repaired, or recycled back
into nature or the marketplace.” GRRN is calling on companies to take
responsibility for the entire life cycles of their products and packaging,
and on governments to not subsidize nonrecyclable-waste processing. “Waste is the result of bad design,” says
Eric Lombardi of Eco-Cycle, a recycler in Boulder, Colo. “The concept
of zero waste leads upstream to the designer’s desk, where waste
needs to be designed out.” Lombardi, a leading light in the fledgling
U.S. zero-waste movement, lays out four basic principles for achieving zero
waste: (1) Make producers responsible for the waste their products create;
(2) invest in infrastructure rather than in more landfills and
incinerators; (3) end taxpayer subsidies for wasteful and polluting
industries; (4) and create jobs and new businesses around the reuse of
discards. Although the concept has been slow to catch on here,
it has been standard practice in parts of Europe and elsewhere for more
than a decade. In fact, some 25 countries require companies to take back
their packaging, and some have gone so far as to mandate “extended
producer-responsibility” laws that force companies to pay for the
waste generated in the production, packaging, and distribution of their
products. In Germany, a 1991 ordinance seeking to address
packaging waste was a huge success. By 2000, the agencies charged with
collecting and recycling such materials were recovering more than 90
percent of the plastics and glass used in German packaging. (In the United
States, we reclaim 5.3 and 26, percent respectively.) Another success story
comes from Australia, whose capital city, Canberra, embarked on a “No
Waste by 2010” campaign in 1996. By 2001 the city had reduced waste
sent to landfills by 40 percent and more than doubled the garbage it
captured for reuse. The city also began fueling two of its power stations
with captured methane gas from its landfills, which is plentiful enough to
power 3,000 homes for 30 years. In the United States, industry has continually put up
roadblocks to any serious consideration of adopting such initiatives at the
federal level. But, according to the Zero Waste International Alliance, at
least 18 local communities have taken it on themselves to adopt their own
strategies for achieving zero waste.
For more information: GrassRoots Recycling Network,
www.grrn.org; Eco-Cycle, www.ecocycle.org; Zero Waste International
Alliance, www.zwia.org.
This article appears in May 25-31, 2006.
