Conservation

The elimination of waste and reduction of consumption remain high priority goals for a planet with finite resources. Key issues outlined here include:

1. reducing domestic waste
2. alternatives to landfills
3. the advantages of composting
4. alternatives to plastics
5. wise use of land

There is also a list of useful sites and sources on conservation.

Reducing domestic waste

The quantity of 'waste' produced by the average person in the United States alone has doubled since the mid 1960s: from 2.7 to 4.6 lbs each day. Waste prevention (source reduction) is the most feasible way to stop this trend… designing, manufacturing, purchasing, and using materials to reduce the amount or toxicity of trash created, rather than having to deal with it once created. A good place to start would be by going for reusable bags for shopping: simple but smart.

Of all the objects in the municipal solid waste stream (MSW) source reduced in the US, containing/packaging represents about a quarter, nondurable goods (eg newspapers, clothing) 18%, durable goods (eg appliances, furniture, tires) 11%, and other throwaways (eg garden trimmings, food scraps) almost half. Recent US government figures on MSW suggest some improvement in the rates of such material now recycled in one way or another; but the overall percentage of sheer, unrecoverable, waste in the United States alone is staggering:

• about 2.5 million plastic bottles are used every hour, only a small percentage of which is now recycled
• enough iron and steel to continuously supply all the nation's auto makers
• enough glass bottles and jars to fill what were the 1,350 foot twin towers of New York's World Trade Center are thrown out every two weeks
• every week more than 500,000 trees are used to produce the two thirds of newspapers that are never recycled
• recycling one aluminum can saves an amount of energy equivalent to half that can filled with gasoline
• packaging accounts for 50% of all paper produced in North America, 90% of all glass, and 11% of aluminum
• enough office and writing paper is discarded annually to build a wall twelve feet high stretching from Los Angeles to New York City
• at least half of all the paper circulating today will be lost to landfill

Landfills

About 95% of our solid waste is disposed of in almost bursting landfills. One out of every two of those landfills needs repair to stop it from leaking. Landfills can be major sources of water and air pollution: solid waste landfills can contain lead and mercury; indeed 25% of sites slated for cleanup under the American Superfund program for toxic waste sites is a former municipal solid waste landfill. Leachate (the liquid that drains from beneath a landfill) is full of conventional and toxic pollutants quite similar in composition and concentration to the leachate draining from hazardous waste landfills. Even when it is successfully collected rather than escaping and potentially contaminating groundwater, however, leachate has to be treated before it can be discharged. This is expensive – as are incinerators, which process about 15% of US MSW.

The decomposition of paper as well as garden waste and other materials in landfills also creates a variety of gaseous emissions including volatile organic chemicals which add to urban smog, and methane, a greenhouse gas that is far more potent per ton emitted than is carbon dioxide in contributing to global warming. Landfills are responsible for an estimated 36% of all methane emissions in the US.

Composting

Every year households in the United States dispose of 24 million tons of leaves and grass clippings, which could be composted to conserve landfill space. There are greater advantages to recycling unwanted garden materials (grass cuttings, kitchen scraps, wooded material, leaves etc) than merely avoiding 'waste'. When produced properly, organic compost is the single most fertile source of nutrition for the soil there is‚ balanced, friable, excellent for drainage and moisture retention, compost enriches the soil in the way that Nature does as vegetation falls to the ground around other plants and decomposes for the next season. To compost household (and municipal) leftovers is also to reduce the amount of effort and energy otherwise necessary in its disposal. Composting prevents the production of substances responsible for atmospheric pollution which would be produced if this matter is burned.

Plastics

A summary of the Environmental Defense report (PDF), reveals that:

• less than 10% of plastics packaging is being recycled; this rate is a third that of the next closest packaging category, glass
• in contrast to the meager progress made in other major packaging types, growth in recycling of plastics packaging has been slow over the last decade. There has actually been a decline recently
• the plastics industry – unforthcoming about this state of affairs, from which it stands to profit, of course – often touts bottle recycling as evidence of its commitment to recycling: this too declined in the 1990s, from 45% in 1994 and 41% in 1995 to 34% in 1996
• the recycling rate for polystyrene packaging and food service items, which has hovered around 1.5% for the last several years, is a rate far below the polystyrene industry's goal set in 1990 and abandoned in the 1990s of achieving a 25% recycling rate by 1995
• from 1990 to 1996 for every additional pound of plastic packaging that was recycled, an average of 4 pounds of additional virgin plastic packaging was produced
• in the 1990s as a whole more than 13 times more virgin plastic packaging was produced than was recycled

Local studies in Berkeley, California, and Leverett, Massachusetts suggest that less than 5% of the waste stream is potentially reusable. On the other hand a recent comparative study concludes that production systems based on recycling offer substantial environmental advantages over incineration or landfilling, for example – let alone use of virgin raw materials.

It is to be remembered that waste is created throughout the life cycle of a product – from extraction of raw materials to transportation to processing and manufacturing facilities to manufacture and use. About US$1 of every US$10 we spend on food pays for packaging. It has been calculated that to use 1,000 disposable plastic teaspoons consumes over 10 times more energy and natural resources than making one stainless steel teaspoon – and then still washing it 1,000 times: durable products (although their manufacture may consume more energy than their disposable equivalents) are used again and again.

Land use

Of about 13 million hectares of land on Earth, about a quarter has been converted into pasture for domesticated animal, an eighth into arable farmland, and just 1.5% into built up area – roads, parking, homes and other buildings. Although this leaves a notional 60% of apparently 'pristine' land, almost all of this has been affected by humans – either by global warming, mining, erosion and similar impositions.

Sources on conservation

The National Recycling Coalition (NRC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement and improvement of recycling, source reduction, composting and reuse by providing technical information, education, training, outreach and advocacy services, Inform, a nonprofit which identifies practical ways of living and doing business that are environmentally sustainable, A Reuse Development Organization (ReDO), which promotes reuse as an environmentally sound, socially beneficial and economical means for managing surplus and discarded materials. WasteConnect in the UK allows you to locate places to recycle almost every conceivable material according to your location. Environmental Defense has a bank of resources with practical ideas, publications and suggestions for sustainable lifestyles and consumer habits etc. A good site on how and why to compost is The Compost Resource Page.