Dennis Posadas Today Online 5 Dec 13;
Everyday, millions of people around the world consume their burgers, soft drinks, candies and other products that involve packaging. These, plus waste food and other materials, end up in the trash with nary a thought from consumers.
If a community strictly enacts segregation, sorting, recycling and reuse, and is able to convert some of the residual waste into heat or steam, then that’s great. But in the real world, there are slobs and those who won’t cooperate; taking the effort to separate those plastic knives from their fastfood meal to dump it into the plastics bin is too much of an effort for some.
Relying on culture and chance might be an option for some – but among many Global 100 corporations, a new trend has sprouted to adopt a serious zero landfill mindset.
Spurred by the threat of more sanitary landfills (which in poor countries are just a step above unregulated dumpsites) from millions of tons of used product packaging bearing the names of household brands, many corporations now see zero landfill as the way forward.
Building more landfills is extremely difficult, and the practice of segregating, composting, recycling – while it sounds good in theory – has not always been effective in practice.
Already companies like P&G, Unilever, Nestle, Kraft, Ford, Toyota and others have put zero landfill as part of their major corporate sustainability goals. This means that these companies plan to evaluate their performance internally and to their shareholders, by measuring how they are able to avoid landfill for their wastes.
In zero landfill thinking, the first step is to try to avoid generating waste in the first place. While a burger might require biodegradable wax paper that keeps it clean but eventually disintegrates, some products do not really require packaging.
Take the ubiquitous dish-washing sponge or the shaving razor. Often we see it sold with plastic wrap packaging – but corporate sustainability officers might also consider selling it in a clean glass bin to consumers to avoid creating unnecessary waste.
If waste is created, like packaging that cannot be done without, then effort should be taken to work with communities to collect it, and to treat it as a resource, say to generate heat or electricity, through waste-to-energy plants.
Waste food can be composted, or converted into methane through anaerobic digesters and converted into electricity, for example. Wastes like plastic, aluminum and glass containers can be recycled.
If consumers see this as a trend and jump on the bandwagon, we can see a fruitful collaboration between corporations and consumers to see what packaging can be done without, with the rest treated as a resource for heat or electricity, if not recycled.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dennis Posadas is the author of Greenergized and is working on a new business fable on innovation and sustainability.
