Waste production is part of our industrial economy. All materials emanate from nature and are mined from the earth in one form or another. Hence the aluminum used in manufacturing cars is made of the ore bauxite, and plastics are made from petroleum which comes from oil wells.
The manufacture of products follows a system of production that involves mining, processing, manufacturing, consuming and finally disposing of what remains. It is often not recognized that waste is generated in each of these activities.
Hence a large amount of bauxite ore will give rise to a small quantity of usable processed aluminum. The rest is waste.
Further, when aluminum is made into sheets and subsequently molded into car bodies, it is smelted, cut and wasted. In the final stage, used cars are dumped into landfills and constitute a very visible form of waste.
The conversion of a natural resource into a product and waste (as we commonly recognize it) is called a product life cycle. Waste is generated throughout a product's life cycle.
In fact, the process of creating a product often involves very hazardous process and the waste that is generated is dangerous and toxic, both to the health of living beings and to the environment. The types of waste can be broadly classified as mining waste, processing waste, waste from manufacturing, waste after consumption (or post-consumption waste), and waste arising from disposal such as toxic ash from the incineration of waste.
The nature and toxicity of waste differs at various points of a product's life cycle. It can be a chemical laden with heavy metals, or it can even give rise to new chemicals such as dioxins and furans when incinerated.
Classically, waste disposal is not accounted for when the cost of a product is calculated. Because waste is simply dumped and no effort is made to contain it safely using proper methods, technologies and procedures, it does not cost money to dispose it.
Over the years, the world has come to recognize the dangers of doing this. When waste is dumped indiscriminately it leads to the contamination of the soil, groundwater and air. Dumping at sea causes fish kills.
Once waste finds its way into ecosystems or into the food chain it destroys life, and it is very difficult if not impossible to clean up. Contaminated soil can cost millions of dollars for clean up.
When toxic chemicals enter the bodies of human beings they become a "body burden" that can cause short- and long-term health effects. This is especially a concern when it affects an unborn or newborn baby because the effect can later manifest at many stages of a person's life.
Other health effects include lead poising, respiratory diseases such as asthma, cancer, and newly recognized problems such as endocrine disruption which causes adverse changes in the body's hormonal systems.
New efforts are being made to mitigate these effects, especially in the more industrialized countries of the world, as the effects of waste have come to be recognized over the past 30 years. The first response has been to ensure that waste is safely contained.
Hence new landfills have been constructed using costly and expensive technologies. New incinerators have been equipped with extremely stringent pollution control devices that minimize air emissions.
Effluent from industries is no longer simply piped into rivers. Now it must be treated and made safer before being discharged.
All this has led to a host of new laws in the developed world, and waste disposal has become very expensive. The laws place heavy penalties on industry if it fails to meet the new standards. "Polluter pays" has become a guiding principle.
Consequently, the cost of production and products started rising and industry became tempted to find cheaper ways to manage the wastes it produces. Terms like waste management and "cradle-to-grave" were coined. They essentially meant that waste would be dealt with in a sustainable manner, from its origin to its final disposal.
Yet these efforts did not entirely solve the problem. Soon it was discovered that all landfills, even the best-designed ones, "leaked" and the most stringent incinerators were not emission free. Both caused damaging health effects and continued to pollute the environment.
This situation gave rise to the credo of waste minimization and recycling. If waste could be minimized, there would be less of it to dispose and hence it would cost less money to do so.
And waste minimization produced savings in natural resources and industrial raw materials because it made more efficient use of raw materials. New process were developed that cut disposal costs and the cost of production itself.
Recycling ensured that after products had been used they could be brought back to the production system and by recovering the materials from which they were manufactured. However, traditionally recyclability was not built into the design of a product. Rather, it was an afterthought.
Products were not made to be easily broken down and recycled. For example, materials that are fused together, such as metal and plastics, could not be easily recycled.
By incorporating recycling into the concept of product design, new products were designed that made recycling easy and possible. New products were designed to be easily dismantled and to contained fewer toxics and hazardous chemicals.
New laws now require industry to design products that can be recycled. Laws also make industry responsible for recycling used products, a task traditionally carried by a separate group of players. Responsibility for making and selling the product is no longer separate from responsiblity for recycling. This concept is commonly known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR).
Waste minimization and recycling, backed by legally-enforced liability and charges for safer waste disposal, paved the way to a sustainable waste economy and were linked to "sustainable development." However, the changeover from the old ways of managing waste – and even the change from perceiving waste management as something other than merely requiring that waste be collected and disposed – to this new way of waste management faces many hurdles. Most of all, these hurdles involve changing existing ways of doing things, infrastructure that already carries a large investment, and a closed mindset.
Fundamentally, not all industry is willing to bear the cost of what this entails, nor the cost of incorporating environmental and human health impact into their products and processes. While the developed world is becoming more conscious and its laws more stringent, developing countries still have a long way to go.
Industrialization is a relatively new activity for developing countries, and they do not have access to the latest developments, processes and concepts of the industrialized world. Waste is dumped openly, and the poorest people in these countries search for anything of value in the waste in order to resell it and make some subsistence money.
Waste disposal does not cost anything in the South, and even where there were are new laws, regulation is weak and very expensive. As developing countries struggle to industrialize and improve the living conditions of their poor, they have become targets for waste dumping. This is the economic divide, which is misused by developed country waste generators.