Materials & Waste | Alliance for Sustainable Colorado

image by ZeroHero, inc, visit www.zeroheroevents.com

Our globalized system of production and consumption produces a huge amount of waste. Americans dump an average of 4.5 lbs of waste per person per day into the trash. And that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the waste created along the path of resource extraction, production and distribution, before consumer goods even enter our homes.

Waste is disposed of in a number of ways, and almost all of it has negative impacts on the environment and human health. Most of our waste is buried in landfills or burned in incinerators. Landfills are the nation’s largest emitter of methane, a gas that is 23 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Organic matter, such as food waste, is the main cause of methane production in landfills. Toxic substances in landfills eventually leak into the ground, polluting our water. Incinerators spew particulate matter into the air, which may increase rates of respiratory disease, lung cancer and heart disease in people living downwind. Heavy metals and other toxins from incinerators spread to land and water, entering the food chain.

Then there is the waste that doesn’t even end up in our waste disposal system – the litter people drop wherever they are. One frightening result is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive collection of plastic trash pulled together by ocean currents, with devastating impacts on sea life. Today, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated to be two times the size of Texas.

There is another way. Sustainability pioneers have been developing ground-breaking new approaches that reduce the amount of resources that go into the production cycle, reduce the amount of waste from production and recycle what’s left. Concepts such as Natural Capitalism and Cradle-to-Cradle design are two radically different ways of thinking about the “Stuff” around us. Forward-thinking entrepreneurs are developing innovative new ways to recycle and reuse more of the resources we used to call “waste.”

You can make a difference by reducing the amount of stuff you choose to buy, by reusing what you do buy, and by recycling and composting as much as possible of what’s left.