Question by Paul Daniel: how to prevent waste? or rather waste of our industry?
aside from recycling or reprocessing waste, what else can you add to prevent waste and what countries you are familiar that they are trying to cure waste in their industry?
Best answer:
Answer by Ambitious
Reduce the usage of plastic bags – HK.
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
Economic incentives. First is the natural one, where it generally costs more to waste than to not waste. The second is government coercion. Discourage waste by creating an artificially high cost for it. Like requiring grocery stores to charge US $1 for a grocery bag. Actually, government-mandated fuel economy standards for vehicles has been rather effective.
By finding the most efficient way to produce the product there would be less waste. By finding a way to use the ‘waste’ materials produced in a process, there would be less total waste.
Some industries do produce hazardous waste. This does need to be treated.
Burning the waste to produce heat or next step, electricity uses the waste.
Less packaging would be of great benefit.
I am no tree huger, nor am i a company person.
but wast is and can be a problem. recycling and reprocessing waste is the best way to limit a part of all wast. your right it does not get to the 100% level.
but do not forget about composting. 40% of all food waste can be used for composting. which is then mixed with soil to grow more food.
a small amount of the waste is and can be used as fuel, methane. but not enough for large scale use. and bio mass, will compete with the food supply. more farmers would produce more product to sell as fuel than food, and food will become very expensive. and even more land will be needed to grow the bio mass for fuel, so more forests will be destroyed in the process. “the law of unintended consequences” trying to do good by doing one thing but in the process cause more harm in other areas.
now government regulations and over sight is needed but not so rigid regulations that it puts the industry out of business. again ‘the law of unintended consequences” putting people out of work, no work, no money, no money to buy food with or buy other things other industries make.
until we can have a waste to pure energy converter. converting waste into all its energy form ( a mater to energy converter like in star trek). then what we are doing is all we can, for the moment.
but more composting can be done in the cities on a larger scale. and composting makes better land fill anyways.