Waste Management Notes

Overview

• Industrialization and urban produces enormous amounts of waste

• space for landfills (especially in urban areas) is becoming hard to find

• Too much waste in too little place

• Cost is another limiting factor

• All societies have waste:

  • municipal, industrial, agricultural, disposal, collected, recycled, treated

• Possible solution: develop new disposal facilities

  • no one wants to live near a waste disposal site

• Integrated waste management: source reduction, recycling, composting, landfill, incineration

• Early views:

  • dilute and disperse moved to concentrate

Integrated Waste Management (IWM)

• Goal: reduce, recycle, and reuse to reduce total amount of waste that needs to be disposed of on landfills or incineration

• Materials management:

  • zero production of waste

  • waste: resource

    • industrial ecology: produce urban and industrial systems that model natural ecosystems

Solid Waste Management

• Urban problem

• Major sources: paper, yard waste, plastics, metals, food waste, glass, wood

• A. On-Site Disposal

  • garbage disposals installed in waste water pipe of — sink

  • reduces and renewed food waste, waste can be transferred to sewage treatment plant

  • Problems: hazardous liquid chemicals and illegal sewer dumping

• B. Composting

  • biochemical process in which organic materials decompose into humus like material

  • problem: necessary to separate organic material from other waste

• C. Incineration

  • reduction of combustible waste to residue by burning at a high temperature

    • advantages: convert large volume of combustible waste to small volume of ash

      • can generate electricity

    • problems: not a clean process, produces air pollutants (acid rain)

• D. Open Dumps

  • oldest most common way of disposing of solid waste

    • problem: little regard to safety, pose health hazards and are unsightly

• E. Sanitary Landfills

  • method of solid waste dispersal that functions without creating a nuisance or hazard to public health and safety

    • most common method in US

    • covered with layer of compacted soil

    • problems: pollution of groundwater by leachate (polluted water), uncontrolled production of methane

    • site selection: topography, location of groundwater table, amount of precipitation, type of soil and rock, location of surface water

Recycling

• Collecting materials that can be broken down and reprocessed to make new items

• Expensive: energy use but reuses material in landfill

• 3 Steps:

  • 1. Collection and processing

  • 2. Using recyclables to produce new goods

  • 3. Consumers buying new goods made from recycled materials

In Class:

• Eco-efficient vs eco-effective

  • less bad vs bad

  • eco-effective: returning resources back to earth

    • ex: biodegradable