Waste Management: where is the ceiling?
In the previous post we left a few questions open. One of them: Can we innovate in the management of organic waste as we have done with the management and alternative uses of non-organic waste? Let’s think about it. We have seen the impact that, not only the inorganic waste, but the improperly mixed organic waste generates. Recently, specialized portalDiario Ecología locates on the map which is the world’s largest landfill.
Seen from Google Earth is presented as a huge brown spot in the middle of the predominant green Rio de Janeiro. Closed since 2012, after 34 years accumulating trash, the area is equivalent to 130 football fields together. Today is a very dangerous source of infection, located across Guanabara Bay. Another shocking fact, sadly logic: it has also been the source for 6,000 working people dedicated to recycling, however, in the worst sanitation conditions, with a corresponding risk of contagion and epidemic diseases.
But even beyond the citizens disability, or ignorance, or lack of resources -but neglect-, when it comes to ensuring the separation of household waste, also it is important to warn that the industry, including food industry, is one of a major responsible for emissions that harm the planet and climate change. Related to this matter we also read recently that according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than 1,300 million tons of food are thrown away each year and a significant percentage of the food that is discarded by household ends up in landfills. It is in these places where CO2 and methane gas, which is 23 times more potent than CO2, is produced. Even more alarming: a study in Europe found that 40% of food is thrown away by consumers it is even in its original packaging.
To prevent uncontrolled storage of mixed organic waste, the best way is not to indiscriminately mixing the waste produced in homes, farms, etc. But behind the impossibility to establish mechanisms as effective as we would like to educate people in the separation of organic waste from other materials, due to the exponential volume of waste we generate each and every one of us and homes, what can we do? And before that reflection: what are we doing?
In November 2013, Retorna along with Ecologists in Action and Friends of the Earth, published an interesting report (A Field in the trash) on the poor management of Spanish landfills, accumulating 275 million tons of valuable raw materials. Specifically, it is estimated that about 70% of all our waste ends up buried instead of recycled. Every citizen in Spain ‘produces’ about 535 kilograms of waste per year. They are 24 million tons a year in Spain, which goes to the 200 legal landfills and there are hundreds and thousands of other illegal dumpsites scattered by geography, pointed Retorna. If we know about it, why we consent? And if we consent, what other mechanisms can we use? How can we innovate to actually stop or reduce this ratio of waste that eventually ends up without being managed? Neither reduced, reused nor recycled.
We can talk now about improvements, optimizations, new ideas, inventions, processes applied under new paradigms, etc. Innovation is at the end, wanting to resolve previously unresolved contradictions. Does this mean that what it is done so far is wrong? No.
It is just that with the information, technology, rules and priorities of each moment, the solutions improve and should improve as we acquire new knowledge. As the environment changes, the solutions fit; as knowledge expands, the solutions grow; as prisms and point of view change, the solutions are more adaptable and decisive.
Innovate is developing new structures, new concepts, and new ideas. From Waste to Cash we firmly believe in innovation to help solving problems as we have discussed in recent weeks. We increasingly generate more organic waste, and the fact to observe and think about it, pushes up the development of alternatives that in another moment would have been dismissed as not viable or inconsistent.
When, how and why great innovation, great inventions, and the great revolutions that break previously established schemes and paradigms occur?
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