Waste

• 1. Introduction

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  Waste is anything discarded after its primary use, or anything worthless, defective, and of no further purpose. That sounds simple. But the moment you try to pin it down, the definition slips away. What one person throws out, another picks up and sells. The Basel Convention frames waste as substances disposed of or required to be disposed of by law. The European Union calls it an object the holder discards. The United Nations Statistics Division describes materials that are not prime products, for which the generator has no further use. So where exactly is the line between garbage and resource? An invention can raise a discarded thing's value above zero, turning waste into a by-product or even a feedstock. This story follows that line as it moves. It runs through landfills holding millions of tons, through nuclear sites that stay dangerous for years, and through a Ghanaian dump where children burn refrigerators with their bare hands.

• 2. Contested Definitions

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  The Cambridge Dictionary keeps it broad, calling waste unwanted matter or material of any type. Governments cannot afford that vagueness, so each has drafted its own line in the sand. The Canadian government treats waste as any material, hazardous or not, that has no further use. In the United Kingdom, something becomes waste when its producer or owner discards it, intends to discard it, or is required to discard it. Australia defines it as materials or products that are unwanted, discarded, rejected, or abandoned. The United Nations Statistics Division adds a sharp exclusion worth pausing on. Residuals that are recycled or reused at the very place they are generated do not count as waste at all. That single carve-out reveals the underlying logic. Waste is less about what a material is than about whether anyone still wants it. A by-product sits nearby on the spectrum, a joint product of relatively minor economic value, waiting for the right invention to lift it higher.

• 3. The Many Faces Of Garbage

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  292.4 million U.S. short tons of municipal waste flowed through American collection systems in 2018, by the Environmental Protection Agency's count. That works out to roughly 4.9 pounds per person every single day. Of that mountain, about 69 million tons were recycled and 25 million tons composted, leaving the bulk headed elsewhere. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines municipal solid waste plainly, as waste collected and treated by or for municipalities. It bundles together household trash, commercial refuse, and the rubble of demolition. Household waste is the most familiar face, the daily stream of product packaging, yard clippings, food scraps, old clothing, appliances, paints, and batteries that mostly ends up in landfills. The clothing figure alone is striking. The average American throws away 81.5 pounds of clothes each year, contributing to an estimated 11.3 million tons of textile waste in the United States. Online shopping has piled on cardboard, bubble wrap, and shipping envelopes. The EPA estimated that 10.1 million tons of plastic containers and packaging reached landfills in 2018, with only 30.5 percent recycled or burned for energy. Commercial waste looks almost identical in content, but a single business location tends to generate more of it than a single home. Construction and demolition debris stands apart entirely, kept outside the municipal solid waste category by the EPA. Steel, wood, drywall, brick, asphalt shingles, and concrete fed an estimated 600 million tons of it in the United States in 2018. Some of that gets a second life. Milled asphalt returns to the asphalt mixture, and fill dirt is reused to level grade.

• 4. The Most Dangerous Discards

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  Hazardous waste is defined by the EPA as a waste with properties that make it dangerous or capable of harming human health or the environment. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, known as the RCRA, hands the EPA authority over the entire lifecycle of such waste, from generation through transportation, treatment, storage, and final disposal. Radioactive waste sits inside this category, produced by nuclear power plants, reactors, hospitals, research centers, and mining facilities. The United States sorts it into five types. High-level waste comes from reactors or reprocessed spent fuel. Transuranic waste is man-made with an atomic number of 92 or higher. Uranium or thorium mill tailings are left after ore is mined or milled. Low-level waste covers contaminated paper, protective clothing, bags, and cardboard. The fifth is a mouthful, technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material, or TENORM, where mining, drilling, or water treatment concentrates radiological material that was already in nature. Oversight is split across a crowded field of agencies. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses high-level waste at privately owned and certain federal facilities. The Department of Energy plans handling, develops disposal technologies, and operates disposal sites. The EPA sets environmental standards and radiation protection guidance. The Department of Transportation regulates packaging and carriage. The Department of the Interior, through the U.S. Geological Survey, runs the geologic investigations behind disposal programs. Then there is energetic hazardous waste, defined by the EPA as wastes with the potential to detonate, alongside bulk military propellants that cannot safely be disposed of any other way. Munitions joined the hazardous list in 1997 under a special provision called the Military Munitions Rule. Even households contribute, tossing expired or faulty ammunition in with ordinary trash. Fireworks, signal flares, and hobby rockets that failed or got damaged add to the danger, as do automobile airbag propellants, whose reactivity and ignitability qualify them as hazardous unless safely deployed first.

• 5. The Electronic Tide

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  2.37 million tons of televisions, computers, cell phones, printers, scanners, and fax machines were discarded by United States consumers in 2009, by the EPA's estimate. Only 25 percent of those devices were recycled. The rest went to landfills across the country. The waste is also a buried treasury. Inside the plastic and light metal enclosures sit computer boards, wiring, capacitors, and small motors holding iron, gold, palladium, platinum, and copper, every gram of it mined from the earth at a cost of energy and greenhouse gas emissions. Refurbishing or recycling these machines cuts both the mining and the emissions. The scale pushed the issue to the top of government. In November 2010, President Obama established the Interagency Task Force on Electronics Stewardship to build a national strategy. Working with the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the EPA, and the General Services Administration, the task force produced the National Strategy for Electronics Stewardship report. It set four goals, incentivizing greener design, leading by example, increasing domestic recycling, and reducing harmful exports while building recycling capacity in developing countries. That fourth goal points across borders, toward an international web that includes the U.S. EPA, the Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration, and the International E-Waste Management Network, with environmental offices from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and North America.

• 6. The Human Cost

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  Agbogbloshie, a dump in Accra, Ghana, was once a wetland. Photographer Kevin McElvaney documented it as the world's biggest e-waste dump. The young men and children who work there smash devices apart to reach the metals inside. They suffer burns, eye damage, lung and back problems, chronic nausea, debilitating headaches, and respiratory illness. Most of the workers die of cancer in their twenties. McElvaney's photos show kids burning refrigerators and computers in fields, their hands blackened and clothes trashed, and animals like cows with open wounds wandering the site. Piles of waste serve as makeshift bridges over lakes, with metals and chemicals seeping into water that may be linked to people's home supplies. Waste management is, at its core, an environmental justice issue. The burdens fall disproportionately on marginalized groups, racial minorities, women, and residents of developing nations. NIMBY, short for not in my back yard, captures the resistance residents put up against new facilities sited near them. Yet the need for more treatment and disposal capacity keeps rising worldwide. A growing transboundary market moves waste between countries, and while most of it travels between developed nations, a meaningful share flows from developed to developing ones. Tearfund, a poverty charity, estimates that between 400,000 and 1 million people die each year in developing countries from diseases caused by mismanaged waste. The informal waste sector lives at the sharp edge of this economy. Waste pickers scavenge metals, glass, plastic, textiles, and other materials, then trade them for profit, reducing waste in the system while carrying the weight of disease, poverty, exploitation, and abuse.

• 7. From Burden To Resource

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  Energy recovery flips the entire premise, pulling heat, electricity, or fuel out of non-recyclable waste in a process called waste-to-energy. The methods run a wide gauntlet. Anaerobic digestion lets organic matter decompose into simpler chemicals without oxygen. Incineration burns municipal solid waste directly, shrinking its volume while generating energy. Pyrolysis heats waste without oxygen to high temperatures, breaking carbon content into gaseous and liquid fuels and solid residue. Gasification converts carbon-rich material through high heat and partial oxidation into a gas stream. The most extreme is plasma arc heating, which subjects municipal solid waste to temperatures between 3,000 and 10,000 degrees Celsius using an electrical discharge in an inert atmosphere. The payoff reaches beyond disposal. Using waste as fuel can divert energy use from fossil fuels, cutting carbon dioxide, and can avert the methane that waste would otherwise release in landfills. Classification can be contentious. Crude Tall Oil, a co-product of pulp and papermaking, is labeled a waste or residue in some European countries, even though it is produced on purpose and carries real value. Several companies turn it into fuel, while the pine chemicals industry treats it as a feedstock for low-carbon, bio-based chemicals through cascading use. Water tells a parallel story. Wastewater treatment runs in three stages, primary sifting to remove large solids, secondary treatment to dissolve oils, particles, and micro-organisms, and tertiary disinfection with chlorine or UV light. A 150,000 gallon-per-day industrial system is estimated to cost between 500,000 and 1.5 million dollars, design and installation included. The stakes are existential. A NASA-led study found many of the world's freshwater sources draining faster than they are replenished, the water table dropping everywhere. Education tries to keep pace. The Talloires Declaration, a sustainability pledge, has driven universities to build environmental and waste management programs, supported by groups like WAMITAB and the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management.