Why we need proper waste management?

by A.S. Cajes

Waste is a resource that is thrown away somewhere because society does not know how to use it. It can take the form of a damaged, broken, defective, extra or unnecessary material produced by a manufacturing process.

Manufacturing refers to the “act or process of generating something”. In this sense, Planet Earth is a huge manufacturing plant. For instance, the planet, through its fundamental ecological processes, combines one atom of carbon and two atoms of hydrogen to form water, which the planet transforms into various states, such as ice, liquid or vapor in a process called the water cycle.

But unlike its artificial counterparts, the planet does not produce waste that cannot be assimilated or absorbed by the natural system. This idea leads to the concept of non-biodegradable waste or stock waste. Stock wastes, such as plastic and tin cans, are resources dumped somewhere and remain there for a long period of time. Because society keeps on throwing stock wastes, more and more non-biodegradable wastes are dumped somewhere until society finds it hard to find a place to store the waste.

Stock waste is the opposite of biodegradable waste or flow waste, which can be assimilated by the environment. Examples of flow waste are biomass or remains of living things, food waste, animal waste, etc. Microorganisms can break down flow waste into materials that can be safely used again. Compost is case in point. It is a decomposed organic matter. It can be used as fertilizer and soil conditioner.

The decomposition of flow waste, however, produces by-products that have been proven to be harmful to the environment. One harmful by-product of the decomposition of organic materials by anaerobic (without oxygen) microbial action is methane, a greenhouse gas that absorbs infrared radiation thereby preventing it from escaping to space. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency: “Methane is about 21 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO₂) by weight…. Methane's chemical lifetime in the atmosphere is approximately 12 years.”

A society that dumps stock and flow wastes, therefore, faces certain risks and problems, such as the following:

• Land use conflicts due to the difficulty in finding a suitable site for stock and flow wastes;
• Health hazards to human beings and other forms of life due to pollution and unsanitary condition;
• Degradation of ecological systems, especially freshwater and marine ecosystems;
• Disasters such as flooding, fires and explosions, and
• Revenue loss due to the high cost of having dumpsites coupled with the potential reduction of the value of real properties located near the dumpsites.

The catalogue of the negative impacts of dumped wastes is “long and lamentable” especially if the flow and stock wastes are mixed with hazardous elements such as mercury, lead and alkali and acid wastes. The need to effectively manage wastes, therefore, should be one of the top priorities of society. This means that every sector of society – national and local governments, business, civil society and the citizens – should work hand in hand to manage wastes well. Finger pointing has never worked in solving the problem of waste management. Since not all sectors of society have a complete understanding about how to effectively manage wastes, it behooves everyone to learn and share knowledge and resources on how to make communities clean. For if cleanliness is next to godliness, then we, as particles of the human society, still have so much to do.