Waste Management Trends

Because Waste Treatment and Disposal are No Longer Enough

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle… These are the three R’s taught to us since we were in grade school.  In the University, we had also been taught of the four means of waste management—source reduction, recycling, treatment and disposal. We all know that source reduction points to efforts to decrease the amount of waste produced, that recycling is the process of transforming waste materials into reusable raw materials, that treatment is the process of removing or breaking down harmful chemicals from the water and air that comes out of a production plant, and that disposal is the release of waste materials back to the environment.

While waste management in the past had been focused more on disposal and treatment than on recycling and reduction, current trends show a reorientation of waste management efforts, emphasizing more on waste reduction than on treatment and disposal as shown in Figure 1.  Hence, while technologies developed in the past had been on emissions control such as catalytic converters in gasoline-operated cars, wastewater treatment technologies, and hazardous waste treatment technologies, current trends are more on the development of clean technologies such as new methods of combustion, production of different fine chemicals and the conversion of biomass for use as fuels.

courtesy by:

http://chedric.hubpages.com/hub/Clean-Technologies