Zero Waste: A New Thinking for a   Sustainable Society   by Warren Snow

Over the last hundred and fifty years, mankind has created an enormous industrial system based on the premise that resources can be extracted and waste from the system poured into nature forever.

Everything manufactured by every factory is sooner or later on its way to a landfill or an incinerator. Now, than at any time in history, the total output of the human industrial waste and materials are finding its way into our communities and ending up as mountains of pollutants in our respective environments.

Finally, belatedly, we have started realizing that resources are finite and that nature can no longer absorb the vast quantities of waste continually released to it.

The same industrial system that created the problem has created two solutions for waste; the first is landfills and the second is incineration or burning. A landfill is just a big hole in the ground; a better name would be 'toxic waste pit'.

After thirty years, big waste companies walk away and leave the community for many generations to deal with the heavy metals, toxins, gases, damage to the environment and the loss of land. The other solution is to burn waste, with all the consequent toxic releases into the atmosphere and dangerous residues still going to landfill.

Communities around the world are rising up against waste, fighting landfills and incinerators and in many cases stopping them. However, dividends are painfully slow. For every single success registered, 10 fresh ones are suggested by filthy rich corporations with influence and affluence that led to the creation of the current problems in the first place. GAIA is becoming recognised throughout the world as a key part of the community based anti-incineration movement and as such is a bright shining light of hope for the many people who suddenly find that there is going to be a huge landfill or incinerator in their back

Consequently, the war against incinerators and landfills should be redoubled. There is need to provide a solution, one that everybody can agree with, one that everybody can stand for.

The Zero Waste campaign, therefore calls for a new industrial system…a new design for a sustainable society. Zero Waste provides people who are 'anti' something with a real positive alternative.

Zero Waste is a competing disposal technology, competing directly with incinerators and landfills. All around the world, surveys show support for and participation in recycling to be over 90 percent, yet recycling has not changed the industrial system because it deals with the final outputs of the system and has very little impact on the design of the products and services that flow through communities and eventually require burying or burning.

Zero Waste seeks nothing less than the total redesign of the industrial system. The good news is that Zero Waste can out-compete existing waste disposal technologies not only from the social and environmental perspective but also the economic.

A significant benefit of Zero Waste is that it favors local communities and local economies. When materials start to circulate local opportunities are created and start to reverse the forces of globalization, which until now have increasingly marginalized small distant rural communities and certain sectors of society.

People on low income and with less education will be able to find local opportunities for training and employment as more and more industries spring up around the materials that are being diverted back into the economy or nature.

Zero Waste is a breakthrough strategy for a society in crisis. Incremental change won't bring about the urgently needed change. What is needed is a total breakthrough; a totally new way of looking at the problem, something that leads to a new paradigm, a new vision, and a new target for society.

Zero Waste in itself is not a technology but rather a basket of technologies that can compete head to head with landfill and incineration. Already Zero Waste is changing the way businesses, institutions, communities, schools and individuals think about waste. We are slowly educating people to think beyond the end of the pipe; to look at the whole supply chain as their business and that every time they buy something they must think where it will end up at the end of its life.

Everybody should take personal responsibility; designers should design products that are durable, repairable and easy to disassemble for recycling and made of materials that can easily be incorporated harmlessly back into nature or back into the industrial system.

Manufacturers should invest in new design, to create products with no waste, to eliminate wasteful packaging and to take responsibility for the whole lifecycle of their products. Retailers need to ask their buyers to think about every single product that they buy and to demand that their suppliers create products in an environmentally sound way with fair labor conditions and no waste.

Universities and schools should incorporate Zero Waste as part of their basic curriculum and to have their own recycling systems in place. They should teach people that when they leave school to work in industry to be responsible for helping to redesign the industrial system so that human society can truly be part of nature.

Governments are urged to take the leadership role and to put the vision of a Zero Waste society forward for their communities and industries to make their countries more competitive. Those countries that don't aim for Zero Waste will increasingly become less efficient and competitive and their economies will decline.

3 core principles for a Zero Waste strategy;

1st principle: 'End cheap waste disposal'. The only way to make Zero Waste possible is for the true cost of disposal to be charged to the waste generators. If we were to charge the true cost of disposal nobody would be able to design something that was going to end up in a landfill or incinerator because the cost of that product would be too high and nobody would buy it.

2nd principle: 'Design waste out of the system'; Zero Waste is an 'end of pipe' strategy but above all it is a design principle. We must design waste out of the system if we are to achieve Zero Waste and we must design the strategies that will enable the supply chain to be radically changed so that it all points up and down the chain, each person is playing their part in creating closed looped, resource efficient systems

3rd principle: 'Engage the people'. No vision and no target will be successful if we do not engage every single person and help them to believe that it is possible to move towards the target; in New Zealand this is what we are trying to do.

There is still a long road ahead and there are many critics waiting and watching for us to fail. Our vision is strong and our target is firm, we are slowly building the infrastructure for a Zero Waste economy and society.