Zero waste is a practical theory of how to wring maximum efficiency from the use of resources. It is third generation planning with wasting as the first generation and recycling as the second.

It is a far more logical approach to efficient use than recycling, for example. Zero waste states that the best way to avoid waste is to reuse everything over and over - perpetually. And that this can only be done if reuse is designed into all products, right from the start. It does no good to design ultimate discard into a product and then struggle after discard to find some way to reuse the bare materials as recycling does today.

As you can probably see by now, Zero Waste is just common sense applied to resource usage.

Our planet demands that we stop wasting resources and begin to use them intelligently. Sustainability is a much overused word today but it lies at the heart of zero waste, because zero waste affects how raw materials are mined, grown and seized for use. What could be more central to leaving a clean and viable planet to our children than planning for the most efficient use of our raw materials and other resources?

Absolutely not. Those of us working with Zero Waste view garbage as an abomination, a stupid idea for how to deal with excess resources that we got stuck with for historical reasons but that we can no longer afford. We know better than to get into arguments about dumps, cans, trucks, collections and fees - the paraphernalia of garbage. Garbage creation is a signal that we are making a mistake and using resources foolishly. When we begin to use resources intelligently, redesigning processes so that they do not make waste in the first place, there will be no further need for all that heavy infrastructure of collection and dumping and the entire garbage industry will simply fade away because it will be unnecessary.

Recycling has been a wonderful concept for the past thirty years. It changed the way the world looks at garbage. But remember, it wasn't the deepest response to garbage and dumps or the most technically sophisticated. It was the FIRST IDEA to be tried when garbage creation exploded in the 1960's and 70's. It focused on the garbage problem directly, instead of looking to find the source of the problem. It is essential that we not follow that example and allow ourselves to be sucked into the problem itself and spend all of our time working with garbage collection, garbage culling, garbage surcharges and the like. Among other things, this has prevented recycling from being effective. Garbage continues to flow into dumps in constantly increasing quantities. On the other hand, Zero Waste goes directly to the SOLUTIONS which are found wherever design is going on. This can be where architects design buildings, where planners design streets and cities, where industrial design departments work on products or where scientists and engineers are designing efficient energy flows. Zero waste is a high end, DESIGN principle, not a low end, MATERIALS CAPTURE method.
There is a general principle that if you spend all of your time focusing on the details of a problem, you will have no time left to focus on the solution. We need to move away from worrying about what the garbage industry is doing.

No, that is a common misconception, frequently rendered as zero waste to landfill. If all we did with zero waste strategies was to keep materials from going into dumps, we would be repeating the mistakes of recycling theory. The waste inherent in dumps reveals only a small part of the horrendous waste that permeates our society.

The failure of recycling to make a dent in the torrent of garbage going into dumps proves my point. What are the most vaunted success stories in the recycling mythos? Aluminum cans are at the top. But consider this, half of all aluminum cans go into dumps in each use cycle while only half are recycled. A typical can has a factory to disposal time of three months. So in three months, half the cans are in a dump. In six months, three-quarters are in the dump. In nine months it is 88% and in one year, 94%. As for glass, all those smashed bottles use up just as much energy and labor to remelt and refill as new bottles would. There is no savings worth mentioning. Compare this to the Zero Waste solution of making all containers resealable and refillable, by the consumer. That would save ALL of the investment in making new containers. Redesign for reuse is the only way to break the insanity of garbage generation.

The term Zero Waste does seem to suggest a focus on dumps. A better term might be Perpetual Reuse but, for now, we seem to be stuck with Zero Waste.

The squandering of materials in dumps is only the tip of the iceberg. In our wasteful society, where products are planned to break early, to be unrepairable, to have their highest functions destroyed by an early death, the worst wasting that goes on is the squandering of all the labor and investment in remaking products repeatedly when all of that remaking would be unnecessary in a sanely designed world.
For example, imagine if all emptied bottles were designed to be endlessly refilled instead of smashed, whether they then go into dumps or into recycling bins. Can you imagine how much more conservative of materials and FUNCTION that would be.
Here are a few other wastes that the movement for Zero Waste needs to think about: The list of unfortunate ways to waste could go on and on. What does this prove? That "waste" is a pervasive idea, a concept that runs through all of human endeavor as a negative thread. Extirpating waste everywhere is a critical need that has not been appreciated earlier because waste has been so widely accepted. This discussion shows that simply keeping some garbage out of a dump is not nearly a sufficient view of zero waste.

Function means the essential job that a product is designed to do. A bit more widely, it is also the job that a user or buyer wants the product to do. What is important is that IT IS NOT THE MATERIALS that compose the product. A bottle is made out of glass, one of the cheapest, most widespread minerals on our planet. The function of the bottle however is to CONTAIN. The materials are almost worthless. All of the value resides in the function. Almost all of the investment and the human labor used to produce the bottle went into creating function. If you break a bottle, destroying its function, you destroy most of its value. If you save the broken glass in a dumpster for recycling, you save virtually nothing of value. All of the investment in energy, capital, construction and labor that went into making the original bottle, has got to be invested all over again to turn broken glass into a new bottle. The central value of function is a universal principle that applies to every product.

  • How would you turn the equation around and save the function rather than the materials?

The case of the bottle is clear. All you have to do is refill the bottle. Not by sending it off to some alien cleaning and filling facility, because that approach is fraught with its own waste. The owner of the bottle needs to take responsibility for cleaning the bottle and bringing it to a facility which makes refilling with the original contents easy and convenient. This kind of facility tends not to exist anywhere, but we need to create them, so that the practice of smashing bottles can be brought to an end.

Essentially every other product can be subjected to a similar analysis that shows the way to reuse its function. Repair, rebuilding and remanufacturing are some of the methods that were heavily used in the past and need to be massively reintroduced. We complain about the way that cheap electronic goods are discarded in favor of new, cheap replacements. But we have purposely eliminated modular construction (which allows reassembling into new models) and repair has become prohibitive due to the lack of repair information and economic support. These are conscious decisions of planned obsolescence, and they can be reversed if we demand it.

  • Wouldn't that kind of refilling station require a whole new business?

Yes it would, and that is the wonderful practicality of the Zero Waste approach. Creating a business that makes refilling readily available to the public is a business opportunity that solves an important problem which is now being artificially "solved" by far more wasteful methods. There is no need to convince politicians to institute new policies, or to change the way that garbage and recycling are being done. The solution is to start a commonsense business that is so efficient that it will take over as the common way of reusing bottles. Once the business is in place, there will be a need to change social policies so that it becomes the universal method of bottle reuse.

  • Is the Zero Waste approach totally new or have the recyclers adopted it?

Actually it was the recycling movement which first figured out the Zero Waste approach. In the mid-90's, the Grass Roots Recycling Network (GRRN) wrote a paper revealing that they realized that recycling could never solve the problems of excess garbage creation. That paper showed that intervention had to move upstream, to the design phase. However, they did not know how to accomplish this in the field so they interpreted their insight as the need for just more recycling. Now we can see how to redesign products as the hoped for solution and this development is much more effective than recycling. The reason is simple - a properly designed product will avoid waste perpetually, each time a product is created.

Unfortunately the recyclers ask themselves what they can do with a discarded material. This is of no interest from a zero waste perspective.

  • Why then does recycling enjoy such wide popularity?

There are a number of reasons. There are the simple ones, such as the fact that most people are not technically trained, are not able to think critically or to imagine new ways of approaching puzzling phenomena and then the fact that Americans suffer from one of the most inadequate education systems in the industrial world.

But more important, I believe, is that the recyclers have had a public relations success dumped in their laps. They get to compare recycling to the dumbest way that anyone could invent for dealing with excess goods, namely the garbage model. Compared to the garbage model, anything else has got to look good. Because the garbage model is so widely accepted, recycling appears to be a major improvement. Any proposal for any purpose will look great if you compare it to the worst possible alternative you can find. Normally, you will not be allowed to get away with that kind of comparision. Normally, you will be asked to also compare your proposal to the best possible alternative. But not in this case!

If recyclers routinely had to compare their approach to Zero Waste solutions, recycling would look like an inadequate, first-attempt response. But since the world at large, including the official world, never requires an incisive analysis of recycling, it continues to look better than dumps and incinerators and recyclers harp on this as the only basis of comparison.

  • How is zero waste related to sustainability and peak oil issues?

Sustainability is thrown around as thought it is a magical term with hardly any meaning. But it basically refers to our planet being able to function forever, without being exhausted. So it is pretty obvious that there are two basic principles to observe. First, do not make use of resources which are finite, and will be exhausted, unless those resources are used over and over perpetually. Obviously when fossil fuels are extracted and burned, we are removing a resource from the earth that is used just once. However, if we use those complex molecules to create a reusable polymer and use that polymer perpetually, we are using that fossil fuel forever. Did you catch that? I called it a fuel. But it isn't a fuel! It's a rich resource of complex molecules. It never was a fuel, except that we framed its usage in that wasteful way.

Next, never design any process or product that depends on discard of any kind, at any level, in any way. Discard is the dragon that pollutes all thinking and that gobbles up resources by removing them from reuse cycles. Since the garbage industry has defined recycling to be a last ditch effort to recapture bits of materials following discard , recycling is never part of a sustainable program. Often you will see or learn of designs that attempt to escape wastefulness by invoking a terminal phase of recycling. This is not a sustainable deus ex machina. What is needed is redesign to avoid discard.

Peak oil refers to the coming end of fossil fuel oil availability in the ground. Our society has been committing a crime against nature by burning all of these molecules for so many years. But that is history now, and our society is dependent on energy that comes from that burning. When the oil is gone, everything dependent on cheap energy will suddenly become difficult to obtain. This includes not only direct fuels but everything dependent on fuel, such as metals, food, electricity, the Internet, appliances, ceramics and polymers, to name just a few. See this article on the coming loss of metals. The way to avoid the worst, wrenching ravages of this new regime is to adopt zero waste principles wholesale. Only then will the aching, constant need for new resources to be wrung from the earth be muted through reuse. Zero Waste is soon not going to be a luxury - it will be obligatory in every field.

  • Finally, how would one go about finding ZW solutions and doing a ZW analysis of a product or process?

You begin by identifying the function of the product. Ask yourself if that function can be renewed and used over again perpetually. Keep in mind that there is no place to "throw" anything away as you go. Then ask yourself how redesign of the product or process can help to reuse its function the way you want to.

Chances are, you will be able to see a few redesign changes that might be useful. Now take those to the engineers or technicians who really know that product or process and brainstorm with them, given the realities they have to deal with, to see if together you can agree on some fundamental or even simple redesign that will make the product reusable in perpetuity given repair, spare parts, robust design or etc. Allow for broken, deteriorated or obsolete parts thru extensive labelling and information that will inform the reuse of the bare materials when that is finally needed. Don't forget to redesign the materials themselves so that they conform to ZW principles, such as not mating dissimilar materials into one part.

  • Do you know where the term "Zero Waste" came from?

It was invented by Paul Palmer, the creator of this website, in the 1970's when he named his company Zero Waste Systems Inc. That was the first public use of the term anywhere.

  • How important is this concept of waste?

Actually it is the glue that holds together all of the environmental movement. Without the easy creation of waste, and the quick disposal of it, our economy could not continue to exploit resources willy nilly as it does. Read more.

Now that you have learned some commonsense about how to actually conserve resources, listen to this radio talk about banning plastic bags for an example of terminal silliness in what passes for a progressive big city. Recycling, garbage focusing - the media, like the recyclers, are stalled in endless thrashing over meaningless qestions about garbage without ever getting to serious solutions. Tsk, tsk, tsk...