We are rarely free to pursue the logical concepts and clear thinking of the Zero Waste strategy. Instead we are forced to swim in the mainstream sea where inefficiency is seen as a way to make profit and destruction of resources is considered good. On these pages, we take a look at some of the particular ways that inefficiency and destruction are motivated.

Do you assume that waste always has to be generated? Are you a victim of the "waste mentality"?
Not to worry - everyone is! But how would you like some medicine for your condition? Follow me down this path to see some implications of too much faith in wasting. .

INDEX
Definitions
Hazardous Waste
Household Hazards
Agricultural cycle
Composting
E-waste (computers)
Methane from dumps
Bulbs, lamps, CFL's
CRT Repair

MAKING USE OF DEFINITIONS
As detailed in the book Getting To Zero Waste, definitions are a potent weapon for controlling public thinking. When it comes to anything which might have any kind of toxicity, defining a product as Hazardous Waste controls the way in which it must be treated while giving the reassuring and convenient impression that all that is intended is public safety.
The term Hazardous Waste when applied to a product, means "dangerous garbage", thus implying that:

nothing useful is possible or intended (because it is garbage), and;
the proper attitude is fear (because it is dangerous).
This simple characterization thus excludes the possibility that:

This product is actually useful. That there are people who value and understand this product who are quite capable of putting it to good use.
That the product should not be contaminated or mixed with other garbage but should be kept clean and secured (because all garbage is equal - mixing it together just means mixing something with itself);.
That the history which caused this product to be called hazardous waste could be faulty, and should not be applied to the next batch or instance of this product (since reuse is a higher goal than creating garbage);
That the proper attitude, instead of fear, would be respect for a significant value; and lastly;
That the proper way to manage this product is to take advice from, or place it in the hands of someone with advanced theoretical and practical training in using it, before it ever became a waste.

DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO BE CALLED WASTE, JUST BECAUSE LEGISLATORS HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH SOMETHING BUT DISCARD IT ???? WHY DOES THE GARBAGE INDUSTRY GET TO DEFINE THE TERMS ???

GREENWASTE
Greenwaste is another term which has become standard in the mainstream. Because it characterizes organic and woody excesses (including prunings, grass clippings and food scraps) as "waste", its effect is to put the garbage industry squarely into the agricultural nutritive cycle, normally known as composting.
It is a principle of Zero Waste that at no time shall any excess become irresponsibly managed. At all times there must be an owner or a responsible manager. As soon as any excess is deemed to be waste or garbage, there is no longer anyone watching and it is fair game to be degraded, mixed with other kinds of garbage and, in the case of organic matter, allowed to rot until it acquires distasteful odors and appearance leading to disgust in the minds of the public. This further empowers the garbage collectors to derogate the product and treat is as fit for little more than destruction or burial. Zero Waste redesigns all processes to be cyclical for reuse and organic matter is no exception. A competent composting industry is the proper manager for all excesses destined for composting. They must also be able to control the ways in which suppliers manage their own organic excesses prior to turning them over to the composter. Since odor is a constant concern of compost operations, it is essential that supplies not be managed in such a way that the creation of odor is encouraged. Instead, like any other input to an industrial process, organic matter must be managed and maintained free of decomposition until it is delivered to the compost operation. The attitude of "this garbage" or "that crap" will never allow this to happen. So it is essential that the garbage industry have nothing whatsoever to do with composting at any point. Only in this case, can composting establish itself as a respectable, independent industry and thrive.
THE LESSON:: we must abandon the term "greenwaste" and speak only of "organic excesses" or "compost inputs" or "grown products".
COMPOSTING AND SAVED ENERGY
The recycling movement has tried to turn composting into a special process unconnected to anything else but the Zero Waste movement simply sees composting as one more design process for eliminating waste and inefficency from agricultural processes. It is a normal ZW activity.
Composting is a way to reuse the nutrients that come from soil in the form of food and fiber, back to the soil. It is the most quintessentially natural reuse method, and the only one that depends on the decomposition processes of nature. Though there is much talk of biodegradable plastics, that is a mistaken design. There are some industrial byproducts which can be turned back to agriculture in the short term, such as plaster (calcum sulfate) that provides a calcium supplement, but it would be much better to use the high purity calcium sulfate as a high purity input for industrial reuse, without degrading it in soil.
There is a movement, financed by the garbage industry, to replace aerobic oomposting with anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic methods, which require much more equipment and capital than composting, convert an insignificant amount of organic matter (less than 5% by weight) into methane which can then be sold and burned. And they use half of the methane themselves just for heating the pile, leaving less than 2.5% for capture. However, this allows the garbage companies to pose as energy producers while destroying all the much more significant values of a rich compost. The environmental movement needs to get more savvy about what is really going on. That means subjecting even green-sounding proposals to serious scrutiny.
One of the obvious values of compost is its ability to reuse natural nitrogen back into soil. I have therefore calculated the amount of energy used to produce synthetic nitrogen via the extremely energy intensive Haber Process for fixing nitrogen under high pressure and high temperature. The calculation shows that world synthetic nitrogen uses the output of 120 large power plants. This is the minimum standard against which methane generation must be measured. It is only a minimum because compost provides many other important values - not just nitrogen. See calculation. Surprisingly, it is estimated that natural nitrogen fixation worldwide fixes only half the amount fixed by synthetic methods.
As an order of magnitude, the question becomes: does anaerobic digestion produce anything like enough methane to run 120 power plants? If not, it is not in the same universe of energy saving as composting is. I doubt that any promoter of anaerobic digestion would dare to compare it to this standard. But the jury is still out.
E-WASTE

California took a huge step backwards for resource conservation when it passed what the recyclers and garbagemen like to call E-Waste legislation. Actually, anything that defines any product as waste or decrees anything to be waste is a huge step into the bad old past, when resources could be made into expensive products and then tossed into a dump after one use.
It was widely reported that people everywhere were holding onto their old electronic devices, and especially computers, because they knew that they were working fine, but were just outmoded. Wouldn't you think that all these computers might be organized to go to the billions of people in the world who have never been able to afford a computer? But no, intelligence and resource conservation is never part of the game in the capitol.
There is even a flourishing trade in COMPUTER REFURBISHING ! All the legislators had to do was support this existing industry which repairs computers, even under these terribly unfavorable conditions, with computers being specifically designed to go obsolete after a few years. This industry donates thousand of computers every month to non-profits and social work agencies.
Instead, the recyclers, scaremongers and garbage industry set their sights on destroying every computer they could find. They based their campaign on what has become the standard approach to environmental drumming up the troops - scare the bejesus out of them!
Story after story was generated about how there is LEAD IN CRT'S ! (Note: CRT=cathode ray tube = computer monitor). And we all know that lead is as scary as Plutonium. Isn't it?
The stories hardly mentioned that the lead is INSIDE GLASS ! No, I don't mean inside a glass container. I mean inside the glass itself. Like it was mixed in when the glass was molten. And it was put there for this excellent reason - to protect computer users from radiation coming thru the screen from the inside of the CRT. To read the scare stories, you would have thought that the lead was some kind of contaminant and that young children were constantly licking the glass surface of the monitors to try to poison themselves. Hint: licking would not get any lead anyway - remember, inside the glass!
But we haven't even gotten to the punchline. Because almost all of those CRT's could have been refurbished, repaired and put back into service, as good as new. In fact, fifty years ago, when CRT's were first being used in televisions, THAT IS WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM ! There was a normal industry devoted to repairing CRT's. That industry has been progressively dismantled by the powers that thrive on breaking up and discarding and making everything into garbage, until there is not a single company in the United States today that repairs CRT's. (see note below)
Naturally the apologists for garbage will tell you that repairing CRT's is not economic. As if there is some magical market that operates outside of politics, outside of lobbyists, outside of greed. Nonsense! The repair of CRT's went away for the same reason that all repair has vanished - because the marketing mafia, caring nothing for the destruction of our planetary resources, decreed that making products that disintegrated after a year or two was the path to profit. And now the California legislature, putting the final stamp on universal garbage generation, has made sure that the repair of CRT's will never again rear its ugly head.
To add insult to injury, now that beneficial reuse has been ruled out, the wasters have the nerve to generate videos ( See E-waste lamentations on Youtube) and articles showing how poor the Chinese and Africans are at chopping up old computers and extracting bits of metal or glass. And they want to use this obvious result of their assault on reuse as the springboard for the next round of wasteful and irresponsible mischief coming out of the politics of waste.
The lesson to take away: Next time that you hear about how toxic and hazardous and dangerous something is (their favorite words) stop, think, and find out from someone who does not stand to gain dues or business or members from your fear, what other way there might be to handle the situation. Is fear really productive to you, or just to the fear mongers?
* TECHNICAL NOTE - CRT's consist of a blown glass envelope, or shell, into which is placed a high voltage "gun" that sprays electrons onto the inside of the front surface, or screen. Chemicals (phosphors) on that screen convert the electron energy into light which you see as an image. In something like ninety five percent of the cases when a CRT fails, it is because the electronic gun has burned out. The repair consists of putting a new gun into the back, thus reusing the glass envelope and the expensive, finely tuned phosphors. The old gun can be repaired or disassembled.
In 2004 I called up every potential CRT repair company I could think of. They all assured me that no one replaces guns any more. - PP

HOUSEHOLD HAZARDOUS WASTE

The accompanying flyer shows how household chemical excesses are treated in the mainstream.

Everything is characterized as waste
E-waste, in the context of recent California legislation, takes for granted that computers are "waste", or useless.
There is no indication anywhere that any chemical could be useful or that the history,production, packaging or distribution of any household chemical could be altered so that they could be reused. The operative question, here and everywhere in the mainstream, is "how do I safely destroy or get rid of this?"

BULBS AND COMPACT FLUORESCENT LAMPS Have you been hearing a lot about replacing filament bulbs with fluorescent bulbs? Where is it coming from? The government, the mainstream environmental organizations, the bulb manufacturers, the electrical utilities? That's usually an indicator that you are not being given the whole story.
Here's a picture of a typical fluorescent bulb that you are being asked to use:
Do you notice anything special about this bulb? How about the fact that it consists of two parts with two different functions? On top is the actual light source. But on the bottom is an electrical device that is responsible for creating the starting voltage that forces the bulb to flash up and begin shining. It is called the ballast. So why are they joined together this way? Why do we not have a more modular construction? Would that be possible?
Actually it is. When the government orders a few thousand CFL's they don't accept this kind of enforced wastefulness that is currently being forced onto consumers. They buy bulbs with SEPARATE ballasts and bulbs. They estimate that one ballast will last through about five bulbs. Yet the CFL promoters for consumers are only too happy to force you to discard perfectly fine ballasts along with your bulbs.
Here is a picture of a filament bulb. Do you know how this works? Inside the glass envelope is a finely wound tungsten filament that shines white hot until it finally burns out. Then what happens to the tungsten and should we care?
It so happens that tungsten is a valuable metal with very special properties. It is uniquely suited for filaments and many other functions. It is widely used to make tungsten carbide, one of the hardest materials known, used for teeth in cutting tools. In fact, tungsten is so important that it is designated a United States strategic metal and the US maintains a strategic stockpile of tungsten in case our sources are cut off. Yet for a hundred years, we have been making filaments out of it and then throwing all that tungsten into dumps. Does this make any sense?
It would be so easy, in a Zero Waste society, to redesign bulbs so that they can be opened up and the tungsten collected, then a fresh filament attached and the bulb evacuated and closed up again. Soon I expect to be able to picture a model of what that would look like. It would not use the same weak, fragile glass used now because it would be used hundreds of times, so it could use robust or expensive forms and materials.

METHANE FROM DUMPS (landfill gas)

The best thing that ever happened to the garbage industry was the energy crisis, as expressed by peak oil concerns and global warming.
Suddenly this dirty industry, best known for rotting, smelly dumps, was able to start capturing a stinky gas that was coming out of its dumps and lo and behold, it was flammable and a component of natural gas.
By the arcane economic calculus of garbage collection, this gas actually belonged not to the citizens who had dumped the garbage, as an unanticipated perquisite, but to the garbage company itself. Suddenly the door had opened and they could reposition themselves as energy companies. All they had to do was collect the gas, burn it in an electrical generator and sell or use the electricity.
Gone were the days of dismal failure when they tried to get energy by actually burning solid garbage, or at least the paper, wood and plastic. Gone were the investments in steam boilers, only to discover that nobody wanted the steam. Everybody uses electricity and it travels on cheap wires, not expensive steam pipes.
Wonder of wonders, not only were they suddenly energy mavens, with the advent of climate change there were new chits called "Carbon credits". Not only could they sell the electricity but when they burned methane which otherwise was headed for the high stratosphere to participate in global warming, they got credits for carbon avoidance which they could also sell to polluters or SUV drivers. Oh, happy days!
The Dutch, unlike Americans, are participants in the Kyoto Protocol. Dutch companies need to garner carbon credits to keep operating. So they built a dump in Brazil and made sure to throw lots and lots of sugar cane bagasse and other biological inputs into it, so that the methane would come pouring out. It didn't work well but that's another story. See the article here . This creates a pressure to destroy valuable organic matter in dumps.
Methane is produced because dumps are anaerobic - there is no air getting into them down below. Thus any organic matter is decomposed by anaerobic bacteria which produce methane. Not much - barely five percent of the dry weight at best, but it adds up. The other 95% of the organic matter remains as a slime which covers the steel, sofas, refrigerators and other things which also have no business being in a dump. So the whole decomposition is a disaster, but garbagemen are paid handsomely to not think that way.
The methane that does come out is mixed with nitrogen and carbon dioxide so it is only about 70% methane. Only a huge dump provides enough to be worth burning for heat. And there is a much more important use for all that organic matter. It has no business being in a dump in the first place.
As you can see, the collection of methane is a scam, to turn a tiny fraction of organic matter into a dilute gas with marginal value, but artificial props keep it going. From a ZW point of view, it would be far better to keep every scrap of organic matter away from dumps entirely. It should all be turned into a compost because it is a critical output of the agricultural system. A ZW analysis is unambiguous - this output must be processed as compost and returned to soils to close the system. The value of this closed cycle far exceeds the trivial value of a bit of methane. Even just the synthetic fertilizer that compost can make unnecessary represents a gigantic investment in energy. My guess is that the more that organic matter is put into dumps, the more fossil fuel our society burns to upgrade the depleted soils. And compost adds much more than nitrogen to soils - it adds body and digested carbon as well.
As the garbage industry plies its pernicious trade, and as gullible environmentalists get on the methane bandwagon, you are going to hear a lot about methane in coming years. Remember that it is a scam for selling dumps. Global warming cannot simply trump soil depletion, but even if your focus is on global warming, it is probably worse, the more that methane is captured. Sure, capture methane arising from past mistakes burying organic matter. But that is not how the scam works - the industry will try to argue for more and more dumping of organic matter in the future as well. The whole process is going to be driven by global warming credits - in the US as well as Holland.

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The various colorful designs found on this website are from Paul Palmer's personal collection of Turkish greeting cards.