Waste
From Envirowiki
Waste is unwanted material - often a by-product of an industrial process, a part of the process which is no longer needed (such as packaging), or a product which has been used. Waste is either re-used, re-cycled, or thrown away. The latter is often problematic, because it ends with litter, which can destroy ecosystems and wildlife, or with landfill, which often requires industrial equiptment to create (using energy), and adds to the greenhouse problem by creating methane.
The fundamental problem with waste (even toxic waste) is it's naming. Within an ecosystem, there are no wastes - everything organism's waste is another organism food source. If we begin to think in the same way, we could practically eliminate landfill, by using the waste products of one process as resources for another. This is known as recycling. It would then become clear that recycling is not optimal, because each cycle requires a large energy input to change the waste back into a resource or product. To overcome this, re-use practices could be put in place. A basic one is a bottle exchange: instead of producing millions of crap quality plastic bottle for beverages and foodstuffs, a smaller number of much hardier bottles could be produced, and simply washed between uses. Such a system is already in place in germany. In such a system, the bottles which break, or become damaged could simply be re-cycled, but even so the energy input into the system would be magnitudes smaller than a pure-recycling system, and could easily be supplied by renewable energy sources.
