How to design for Zero Waste solutions to problems.
Any design for ZW necessarily falls back on basic principles. I think this sums them up, but you
may want to add more or comment on these. In thinking about the impact of these principles, you can
see that moving to a Zero Waste society requires strong social engineering It is not a trivial,
completely transparent add-on that affects nothing significant, such as "a little more recycling"
or "shop for green". Along these lines,
see this NY Times article about green shopping
PRINCIPLES
This is the one principle which cuts across all the others. Design for an entire lifecycle
or ecology or an entire industry or an entire commerce or society. Do not design
piecemeal, just to improve one product, replace one material or solve one limited local problem but
look at the entire picture, including all the implications of your changes far from where they are
being implemented. Ask where all input products are being manufactured, how wasteful they are, how
those manufacturing processes can be changed in turn and what effect your change has on the
reutilization of your products.
-
An example: the banning of plastic bags. Do not think in terms of bans but do think in
terms of an alternative way to accomplish the same thing (except better). The focus must be on
the ALTERNATIVE, not on the ban. Banning things is a lazy way to greenwash your efforts,
compared to the difficulty of designing an alternative. Do not accept a biodegradable
alternative. Biodegradable plastic is no better than conventional plastic. It does not embody
any inherent design for reuse - in fact - it implies the difficult, expensive and labor
intensive creation of a highly functional molecule followed by its quick destruction.
-
Push the design upstream to design for reuse, not for discard. Correct design starts when a
product is first contemplated. Just as costs, markets and materials are elementary design
considerations, so must perpetual reutilization be. Ending up with degraded or mixed garbage after
use is never a given, only a design failure. Planning for post use diversion from garbage is never
acceptable.
-
Even when high functional reuse is no longer possible, and an article must be reduced to its
component materials for their reuse, employ higher level design to make that operation more
effective. Prime examples are metals and plastics because either of them may consist of
thousands of possible alloys. Keeping track of their exact composition is essential to
their reuse.
-
Design to capture the highest function, not the lowest. Do not design for materials capture but
for the repair and reuse of every article's highest value. For example removing a large formed
plastic part from an automobile and grinding it up into chips is not a Zero Waste operation unless
there is no known way to reuse the entire formed part. It is recycling of the lowest value, because
all of the resources that were expended to form the part are arbitrarily discarded.
-
Materials that are formed by careful and expensive molecular design (such as plastics or
alloys) are high function items. Any method which destroys molecular organization is a
destruction method, even if it masquerades as material recycling. Compostability is never a
reuse method for highly organized molecules. Biodegradable plastics are primarily a clever
substitution of destruction (greenwashing) under the guise of reuse thru composting.
-
Composting is a method for recapturing natural nutrient values from very complex natural
products. It has no role in treating anything else. Composting is not a special add-on
concept but is the normal Zero Waste response to the need for designing closed agricultural
cycles.
-
Do not focus on consumer articles only but include industrial and large scale consumer items in
their highest manifestations. Do not demolish buildings, cooling systems, processing plants,
conveyor systems, display systems, forklifts, trucks, buses etc. but preserve them as complete
systems and reinstall them elsewhere as needed.
-
Build in financing of later reuse at the point of sale, not at the end of a first life cycle.
Repair, reuse etc. is not an add-on service and cannot be charged that way. It is a commitment that
a civilized society makes towards its design for living, and must be allowed for financially and
fully at the earliest possible time.
-
Separate all articles by logical category, avoiding all mixing. The
garbage mentality claims that all discards are equal, all candidates for dumping,
therefore mixing them causes no harm. The Zero Waste mentality claims that all articles are
different, requiring different attention to reuse them. Mixing degrades them. This applies strongly
to chemicals, but also to scraps, consumer excesses and all industrial excesses. Especially
egregious is the permanent joining of incompatible materials which cannot be reused as a unit.
-
Some examples: The use of glues to cement plastic to metal or to wood as a cosmetic or protective cover or veneer. The use of mortar (cement) to build brick structures (is there a better way to join bricks together?). The use of metallic plating on other metals (e.g. gold on copper for circuit boards). As always, these may be critical structures for which no obvious alternative is easily found.
-
No article for reuse may pass thru any intermediate stage in which no one takes responsibility.
This stage will cause irremediable degradation. As soon as an article has no owner, no one
responsible, the garbage mentality takes over. This means that articles cannot be 'thrown' into a
dumpster for 'someone else' to take care of.
Who is in charge here? No one!
-
Emphasize that every owner of an article retains responsibility for the next reuse of that
article until the next owner has assumed responsibility, including the obligation to preserve
information. Allow no zone of irresponsibility, such as a garbage can or transfer station,
unless someone is in charge committed to reuse and conservation.
- Information
about all articles is the rock solid basis of reuse. The casual, frantic identification of
discarded, abandoned articles (as happens in thrift shops) is hardly more than garbage management.
Information about every article must be captured and preserved at all times thru labels, notations,
rfid's, bar codes, Internet sites, specification sheets and every other possible means.
-
Admit ignorance. Design for ZW is a complex operation requiring time, money and research. We do
not, and cannot be expected to, have, all the answers. Many of the needed answers can only be found
thru research. Never allow the garbage world to belittle Zero Waste design because answers must be
discovered. It is only garbage dumps which have a single answer for everything.
-
Universal reuse will demand experts and expertise, particularly with the more technical kinds
of items but even with ordinary items. It is, unfortunately, no more of a catchall industry
for people of mental handicaps than any other technical industry. It is only the handling of
garbage, and their lowgrade form of recycling called diversion, which require no knowledge or
intelligence.
-
Reuse is a technically demanding and advanced industry. The answers aren't simple. Often
decisions have to be made about intertwined life cycles or the right time to abandon a function
or to reconstitute it thru repair or upgrade. You will not be able to answer every challenge:
"So what do I do with xxxxx?" Get comfortable with the difficulties. Challenge everyone to find
their own, tentative but innovative solutions to designing in reuse. The exercise will convince
skeptics that reuse is not all that difficult to design for, once one abandons the notion of
the ever welcoming dump.
-
Do not compete with subsidized garbage management. Removal of all subsidies for garbage and a
strong upward pressure on all garbage fees is a major weapon for the transition to ZW. The
subsidies for garbage are legion and subtle. A big one is that they are allowed to remove a portion
of the surface of the earth from future beneficial use, without paying for that loss of planetary
surface. Then the industry monitors its dumps for a few years after filling them, after which they
expect the public to pay for all future problems.
-
Garbage collection is not a public service. The encouragement of garbage creation thru
collection and dumping does dreadful harm to society. It needs to be eliminated, not honored
as a service. Municipalities should not be contracting for it. The garbage industry should be
forced to compete in the public marketplace, without subsidies, like every other industry, for
as long as it still exists.
-
The money that is wasted on garbage collection and dumping is money that is spent to destroy
our planet. We should be removing that money from garbage collection and applying it to Zero
Waste solutions and research. There is a huge amount of money available for research into Zero
Waste, but it is being squandered today on garbage collection.
-
The study of garbage generation, dumping practices and other trivia of the garbage industry is
not the business of the recycling industry, except insofar as it helps in the elimination of
such practices. You will repeatedly be expected by government and the public to involve
yourself in solving 'waste issues', as though finding a place to dump garbage is an
environmental problem. This is usually simple ignorance, not malice, so gently but firmly
educate the public about the difference between garbage and universal reuse.
-
Collection is neither recycling nor reuse! Simply putting "recyclables" into a separate bag is
not recycling. Until a specific item has an effective and operational reuse pathway, it is not
reused. Just reducing the amount of something going into a dump is not a Zero Waste success.
Extending the life of a dump is not a Zero Waste success. Zero Waste successes are not measured
at the dump but at the design, reuse or repair facility.
-
The measures used for garbage are not valid for measuring Zero Waste progress. The primary
measure for success in reuse is the value of the assembled goods that are reused, not
the "amount" of their contained materials, not their weight and not their volume. Those are
measures of garbage, but irrelevant to Zero Waste.
-
Choose your projects carefully to be soluble and do not accept challenges from the garbage industry
to solve their problems on your time. Turn the tables on anyone who asks you to design "magical"
solutions i.e. instant answers. Design realistic solutions instead, which may require research, and
challenge opponents to redesign their own practices to meet your requirements.
"Do not destroy the world unless you have something better to replace it with."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Poetry As Insurgent Art
Do not fight against the darkness. First find a spark of light.
Maharishi Yogi
-
Design your own terminology. Never use terminology or conceptual frames which presuppose the
methods of the opposition or competition. Under no circumstances use terms like landfill (there
is no empty land waiting to be filled with garbage), waste (no article is inherently unusable),
waste management (a backhanded way to say garbage is okay), hauling (carrying an excess somewhere
is the least important action) or disposal (this has been bastardized to mean dumping). There is no
such thing as a "landfill crisis", a "crisis of capacity" or "too much garbage". There is no need
to find "somewhere to put it". There is only too little design for reuse.
-
Toxicity is an opportunity, not a difficulty. Toxic materials are just as reusable as anything
else, but they have the added benefit that they have been carefully monitored and controlled so
they are available in pure or well understood forms. Chemicals are highly interconvertible which
opens many pathways to reuse. Reuse is a universal requirement, which applies to radioactive nuclei
in just the same way as it applies to an apple core. There is no other way to make radioactive
excesses safe but to find a continuing new home for them.
-
Zero Waste thinking should be applied to processes as well as products. You need to keep the entire
manufacturing process in mind, not just the profitability or materials conservation of one single
sector.
-
The greatest waste of resources is not found in simple dumping but in the needless repetition
of creating products which were designed for one-trip wasting. The efforts of creating
factories, designs, departments, refineries and machinery and the need for employing human
labor is where the greatest waste is encountered. The humans needed for all of this needless
manufacturing and services use up all of the inputs that all people make use of. This is where
the major waste of clean water, air and soil arises and it will be just as true if all
materials are recycled and nothing goes into a dump.
If you want to see how these principles are applied to an actual ZW design project, click here
How to design for Zero Waste solutions to problems.
| Any design for ZW necessarily falls back on basic principles. I think this sums them up, but you may want to add more or comment on these. In thinking about the impact of these principles, you can see that moving to a Zero Waste society requires strong social engineering It is not a trivial, completely transparent add-on that affects nothing significant, such as "a little more recycling" or "shop for green". Along these lines, see this NY Times article about green shopping |
PRINCIPLES
This is the one principle which cuts across all the others. Design for an entire lifecycle
or ecology or an entire industry or an entire commerce or society. Do not design
piecemeal, just to improve one product, replace one material or solve one limited local problem but
look at the entire picture, including all the implications of your changes far from where they are
being implemented. Ask where all input products are being manufactured, how wasteful they are, how
those manufacturing processes can be changed in turn and what effect your change has on the
reutilization of your products.
-
An example: the banning of plastic bags. Do not think in terms of bans but do think in
terms of an alternative way to accomplish the same thing (except better). The focus must be on
the ALTERNATIVE, not on the ban. Banning things is a lazy way to greenwash your efforts,
compared to the difficulty of designing an alternative. Do not accept a biodegradable
alternative. Biodegradable plastic is no better than conventional plastic. It does not embody
any inherent design for reuse - in fact - it implies the difficult, expensive and labor
intensive creation of a highly functional molecule followed by its quick destruction.
-
Push the design upstream to design for reuse, not for discard. Correct design starts when a
product is first contemplated. Just as costs, markets and materials are elementary design
considerations, so must perpetual reutilization be. Ending up with degraded or mixed garbage after
use is never a given, only a design failure. Planning for post use diversion from garbage is never
acceptable.
-
Even when high functional reuse is no longer possible, and an article must be reduced to its
component materials for their reuse, employ higher level design to make that operation more
effective. Prime examples are metals and plastics because either of them may consist of
thousands of possible alloys. Keeping track of their exact composition is essential to
their reuse.
-
Design to capture the highest function, not the lowest. Do not design for materials capture but
for the repair and reuse of every article's highest value. For example removing a large formed
plastic part from an automobile and grinding it up into chips is not a Zero Waste operation unless
there is no known way to reuse the entire formed part. It is recycling of the lowest value, because
all of the resources that were expended to form the part are arbitrarily discarded.
-
Materials that are formed by careful and expensive molecular design (such as plastics or
alloys) are high function items. Any method which destroys molecular organization is a
destruction method, even if it masquerades as material recycling. Compostability is never a
reuse method for highly organized molecules. Biodegradable plastics are primarily a clever
substitution of destruction (greenwashing) under the guise of reuse thru composting.
-
Composting is a method for recapturing natural nutrient values from very complex natural
products. It has no role in treating anything else. Composting is not a special add-on
concept but is the normal Zero Waste response to the need for designing closed agricultural
cycles.
-
Do not focus on consumer articles only but include industrial and large scale consumer items in
their highest manifestations. Do not demolish buildings, cooling systems, processing plants,
conveyor systems, display systems, forklifts, trucks, buses etc. but preserve them as complete
systems and reinstall them elsewhere as needed.
-
Build in financing of later reuse at the point of sale, not at the end of a first life cycle.
Repair, reuse etc. is not an add-on service and cannot be charged that way. It is a commitment that
a civilized society makes towards its design for living, and must be allowed for financially and
fully at the earliest possible time.
-
Separate all articles by logical category, avoiding all mixing. The
garbage mentality claims that all discards are equal, all candidates for dumping,
therefore mixing them causes no harm. The Zero Waste mentality claims that all articles are
different, requiring different attention to reuse them. Mixing degrades them. This applies strongly
to chemicals, but also to scraps, consumer excesses and all industrial excesses. Especially
egregious is the permanent joining of incompatible materials which cannot be reused as a unit.
-
Some examples: The use of glues to cement plastic to metal or to wood as a cosmetic or protective cover or veneer. The use of mortar (cement) to build brick structures (is there a better way to join bricks together?). The use of metallic plating on other metals (e.g. gold on copper for circuit boards). As always, these may be critical structures for which no obvious alternative is easily found.
-
No article for reuse may pass thru any intermediate stage in which no one takes responsibility.
This stage will cause irremediable degradation. As soon as an article has no owner, no one
responsible, the garbage mentality takes over. This means that articles cannot be 'thrown' into a
dumpster for 'someone else' to take care of.
Who is in charge here? No one!
-
Emphasize that every owner of an article retains responsibility for the next reuse of that
article until the next owner has assumed responsibility, including the obligation to preserve
information. Allow no zone of irresponsibility, such as a garbage can or transfer station,
unless someone is in charge committed to reuse and conservation.
- Information
about all articles is the rock solid basis of reuse. The casual, frantic identification of
discarded, abandoned articles (as happens in thrift shops) is hardly more than garbage management.
Information about every article must be captured and preserved at all times thru labels, notations,
rfid's, bar codes, Internet sites, specification sheets and every other possible means.
-
Admit ignorance. Design for ZW is a complex operation requiring time, money and research. We do
not, and cannot be expected to, have, all the answers. Many of the needed answers can only be found
thru research. Never allow the garbage world to belittle Zero Waste design because answers must be
discovered. It is only garbage dumps which have a single answer for everything.
-
Universal reuse will demand experts and expertise, particularly with the more technical kinds
of items but even with ordinary items. It is, unfortunately, no more of a catchall industry
for people of mental handicaps than any other technical industry. It is only the handling of
garbage, and their lowgrade form of recycling called diversion, which require no knowledge or
intelligence.
-
Reuse is a technically demanding and advanced industry. The answers aren't simple. Often
decisions have to be made about intertwined life cycles or the right time to abandon a function
or to reconstitute it thru repair or upgrade. You will not be able to answer every challenge:
"So what do I do with xxxxx?" Get comfortable with the difficulties. Challenge everyone to find
their own, tentative but innovative solutions to designing in reuse. The exercise will convince
skeptics that reuse is not all that difficult to design for, once one abandons the notion of
the ever welcoming dump.
-
Do not compete with subsidized garbage management. Removal of all subsidies for garbage and a
strong upward pressure on all garbage fees is a major weapon for the transition to ZW. The
subsidies for garbage are legion and subtle. A big one is that they are allowed to remove a portion
of the surface of the earth from future beneficial use, without paying for that loss of planetary
surface. Then the industry monitors its dumps for a few years after filling them, after which they
expect the public to pay for all future problems.
-
Garbage collection is not a public service. The encouragement of garbage creation thru
collection and dumping does dreadful harm to society. It needs to be eliminated, not honored
as a service. Municipalities should not be contracting for it. The garbage industry should be
forced to compete in the public marketplace, without subsidies, like every other industry, for
as long as it still exists.
-
The money that is wasted on garbage collection and dumping is money that is spent to destroy
our planet. We should be removing that money from garbage collection and applying it to Zero
Waste solutions and research. There is a huge amount of money available for research into Zero
Waste, but it is being squandered today on garbage collection.
-
The study of garbage generation, dumping practices and other trivia of the garbage industry is
not the business of the recycling industry, except insofar as it helps in the elimination of
such practices. You will repeatedly be expected by government and the public to involve
yourself in solving 'waste issues', as though finding a place to dump garbage is an
environmental problem. This is usually simple ignorance, not malice, so gently but firmly
educate the public about the difference between garbage and universal reuse.
-
Collection is neither recycling nor reuse! Simply putting "recyclables" into a separate bag is
not recycling. Until a specific item has an effective and operational reuse pathway, it is not
reused. Just reducing the amount of something going into a dump is not a Zero Waste success.
Extending the life of a dump is not a Zero Waste success. Zero Waste successes are not measured
at the dump but at the design, reuse or repair facility.
-
The measures used for garbage are not valid for measuring Zero Waste progress. The primary
measure for success in reuse is the value of the assembled goods that are reused, not
the "amount" of their contained materials, not their weight and not their volume. Those are
measures of garbage, but irrelevant to Zero Waste.
-
Choose your projects carefully to be soluble and do not accept challenges from the garbage industry
to solve their problems on your time. Turn the tables on anyone who asks you to design "magical"
solutions i.e. instant answers. Design realistic solutions instead, which may require research, and
challenge opponents to redesign their own practices to meet your requirements.
"Do not destroy the world unless you have something better to replace it with."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Poetry As Insurgent Art
Do not fight against the darkness. First find a spark of light.
Maharishi Yogi
-
Design your own terminology. Never use terminology or conceptual frames which presuppose the
methods of the opposition or competition. Under no circumstances use terms like landfill (there
is no empty land waiting to be filled with garbage), waste (no article is inherently unusable),
waste management (a backhanded way to say garbage is okay), hauling (carrying an excess somewhere
is the least important action) or disposal (this has been bastardized to mean dumping). There is no
such thing as a "landfill crisis", a "crisis of capacity" or "too much garbage". There is no need
to find "somewhere to put it". There is only too little design for reuse.
-
Toxicity is an opportunity, not a difficulty. Toxic materials are just as reusable as anything
else, but they have the added benefit that they have been carefully monitored and controlled so
they are available in pure or well understood forms. Chemicals are highly interconvertible which
opens many pathways to reuse. Reuse is a universal requirement, which applies to radioactive nuclei
in just the same way as it applies to an apple core. There is no other way to make radioactive
excesses safe but to find a continuing new home for them.
-
Zero Waste thinking should be applied to processes as well as products. You need to keep the entire
manufacturing process in mind, not just the profitability or materials conservation of one single
sector.
-
The greatest waste of resources is not found in simple dumping but in the needless repetition
of creating products which were designed for one-trip wasting. The efforts of creating
factories, designs, departments, refineries and machinery and the need for employing human
labor is where the greatest waste is encountered. The humans needed for all of this needless
manufacturing and services use up all of the inputs that all people make use of. This is where
the major waste of clean water, air and soil arises and it will be just as true if all
materials are recycled and nothing goes into a dump.
If you want to see how these principles are applied to an actual ZW design project, click here
This is the one principle which cuts across all the others. Design for an entire lifecycle
or ecology or an entire industry or an entire commerce or society. Do not design
piecemeal, just to improve one product, replace one material or solve one limited local problem but
look at the entire picture, including all the implications of your changes far from where they are
being implemented. Ask where all input products are being manufactured, how wasteful they are, how
those manufacturing processes can be changed in turn and what effect your change has on the
reutilization of your products.
-
An example: the banning of plastic bags. Do not think in terms of bans but do think in
terms of an alternative way to accomplish the same thing (except better). The focus must be on
the ALTERNATIVE, not on the ban. Banning things is a lazy way to greenwash your efforts,
compared to the difficulty of designing an alternative. Do not accept a biodegradable
alternative. Biodegradable plastic is no better than conventional plastic. It does not embody
any inherent design for reuse - in fact - it implies the difficult, expensive and labor
intensive creation of a highly functional molecule followed by its quick destruction.
-
Push the design upstream to design for reuse, not for discard. Correct design starts when a
product is first contemplated. Just as costs, markets and materials are elementary design
considerations, so must perpetual reutilization be. Ending up with degraded or mixed garbage after
use is never a given, only a design failure. Planning for post use diversion from garbage is never
acceptable.
-
Even when high functional reuse is no longer possible, and an article must be reduced to its
component materials for their reuse, employ higher level design to make that operation more
effective. Prime examples are metals and plastics because either of them may consist of
thousands of possible alloys. Keeping track of their exact composition is essential to
their reuse.
-
Design to capture the highest function, not the lowest. Do not design for materials capture but
for the repair and reuse of every article's highest value. For example removing a large formed
plastic part from an automobile and grinding it up into chips is not a Zero Waste operation unless
there is no known way to reuse the entire formed part. It is recycling of the lowest value, because
all of the resources that were expended to form the part are arbitrarily discarded.
-
Materials that are formed by careful and expensive molecular design (such as plastics or
alloys) are high function items. Any method which destroys molecular organization is a
destruction method, even if it masquerades as material recycling. Compostability is never a
reuse method for highly organized molecules. Biodegradable plastics are primarily a clever
substitution of destruction (greenwashing) under the guise of reuse thru composting.
-
Composting is a method for recapturing natural nutrient values from very complex natural
products. It has no role in treating anything else. Composting is not a special add-on
concept but is the normal Zero Waste response to the need for designing closed agricultural
cycles.
-
Do not focus on consumer articles only but include industrial and large scale consumer items in
their highest manifestations. Do not demolish buildings, cooling systems, processing plants,
conveyor systems, display systems, forklifts, trucks, buses etc. but preserve them as complete
systems and reinstall them elsewhere as needed.
-
Build in financing of later reuse at the point of sale, not at the end of a first life cycle.
Repair, reuse etc. is not an add-on service and cannot be charged that way. It is a commitment that
a civilized society makes towards its design for living, and must be allowed for financially and
fully at the earliest possible time.
-
Separate all articles by logical category, avoiding all mixing. The
garbage mentality claims that all discards are equal, all candidates for dumping,
therefore mixing them causes no harm. The Zero Waste mentality claims that all articles are
different, requiring different attention to reuse them. Mixing degrades them. This applies strongly
to chemicals, but also to scraps, consumer excesses and all industrial excesses. Especially
egregious is the permanent joining of incompatible materials which cannot be reused as a unit.
-
Some examples: The use of glues to cement plastic to metal or to wood as a cosmetic or protective cover or veneer. The use of mortar (cement) to build brick structures (is there a better way to join bricks together?). The use of metallic plating on other metals (e.g. gold on copper for circuit boards). As always, these may be critical structures for which no obvious alternative is easily found.
-
No article for reuse may pass thru any intermediate stage in which no one takes responsibility.
This stage will cause irremediable degradation. As soon as an article has no owner, no one
responsible, the garbage mentality takes over. This means that articles cannot be 'thrown' into a
dumpster for 'someone else' to take care of.
Who is in charge here? No one!
-
Emphasize that every owner of an article retains responsibility for the next reuse of that
article until the next owner has assumed responsibility, including the obligation to preserve
information. Allow no zone of irresponsibility, such as a garbage can or transfer station,
unless someone is in charge committed to reuse and conservation.
- Information
about all articles is the rock solid basis of reuse. The casual, frantic identification of
discarded, abandoned articles (as happens in thrift shops) is hardly more than garbage management.
Information about every article must be captured and preserved at all times thru labels, notations,
rfid's, bar codes, Internet sites, specification sheets and every other possible means.
-
Admit ignorance. Design for ZW is a complex operation requiring time, money and research. We do
not, and cannot be expected to, have, all the answers. Many of the needed answers can only be found
thru research. Never allow the garbage world to belittle Zero Waste design because answers must be
discovered. It is only garbage dumps which have a single answer for everything.
-
Universal reuse will demand experts and expertise, particularly with the more technical kinds
of items but even with ordinary items. It is, unfortunately, no more of a catchall industry
for people of mental handicaps than any other technical industry. It is only the handling of
garbage, and their lowgrade form of recycling called diversion, which require no knowledge or
intelligence.
-
Reuse is a technically demanding and advanced industry. The answers aren't simple. Often
decisions have to be made about intertwined life cycles or the right time to abandon a function
or to reconstitute it thru repair or upgrade. You will not be able to answer every challenge:
"So what do I do with xxxxx?" Get comfortable with the difficulties. Challenge everyone to find
their own, tentative but innovative solutions to designing in reuse. The exercise will convince
skeptics that reuse is not all that difficult to design for, once one abandons the notion of
the ever welcoming dump.
-
Do not compete with subsidized garbage management. Removal of all subsidies for garbage and a
strong upward pressure on all garbage fees is a major weapon for the transition to ZW. The
subsidies for garbage are legion and subtle. A big one is that they are allowed to remove a portion
of the surface of the earth from future beneficial use, without paying for that loss of planetary
surface. Then the industry monitors its dumps for a few years after filling them, after which they
expect the public to pay for all future problems.
-
Garbage collection is not a public service. The encouragement of garbage creation thru
collection and dumping does dreadful harm to society. It needs to be eliminated, not honored
as a service. Municipalities should not be contracting for it. The garbage industry should be
forced to compete in the public marketplace, without subsidies, like every other industry, for
as long as it still exists.
-
The money that is wasted on garbage collection and dumping is money that is spent to destroy
our planet. We should be removing that money from garbage collection and applying it to Zero
Waste solutions and research. There is a huge amount of money available for research into Zero
Waste, but it is being squandered today on garbage collection.
-
The study of garbage generation, dumping practices and other trivia of the garbage industry is
not the business of the recycling industry, except insofar as it helps in the elimination of
such practices. You will repeatedly be expected by government and the public to involve
yourself in solving 'waste issues', as though finding a place to dump garbage is an
environmental problem. This is usually simple ignorance, not malice, so gently but firmly
educate the public about the difference between garbage and universal reuse.
-
Collection is neither recycling nor reuse! Simply putting "recyclables" into a separate bag is
not recycling. Until a specific item has an effective and operational reuse pathway, it is not
reused. Just reducing the amount of something going into a dump is not a Zero Waste success.
Extending the life of a dump is not a Zero Waste success. Zero Waste successes are not measured
at the dump but at the design, reuse or repair facility.
-
The measures used for garbage are not valid for measuring Zero Waste progress. The primary
measure for success in reuse is the value of the assembled goods that are reused, not
the "amount" of their contained materials, not their weight and not their volume. Those are
measures of garbage, but irrelevant to Zero Waste.
-
Choose your projects carefully to be soluble and do not accept challenges from the garbage industry
to solve their problems on your time. Turn the tables on anyone who asks you to design "magical"
solutions i.e. instant answers. Design realistic solutions instead, which may require research, and
challenge opponents to redesign their own practices to meet your requirements.
"Do not destroy the world unless you have something better to replace it with."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Poetry As Insurgent Art
Do not fight against the darkness. First find a spark of light.
Maharishi Yogi
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Design your own terminology. Never use terminology or conceptual frames which presuppose the
methods of the opposition or competition. Under no circumstances use terms like landfill (there
is no empty land waiting to be filled with garbage), waste (no article is inherently unusable),
waste management (a backhanded way to say garbage is okay), hauling (carrying an excess somewhere
is the least important action) or disposal (this has been bastardized to mean dumping). There is no
such thing as a "landfill crisis", a "crisis of capacity" or "too much garbage". There is no need
to find "somewhere to put it". There is only too little design for reuse.
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Toxicity is an opportunity, not a difficulty. Toxic materials are just as reusable as anything
else, but they have the added benefit that they have been carefully monitored and controlled so
they are available in pure or well understood forms. Chemicals are highly interconvertible which
opens many pathways to reuse. Reuse is a universal requirement, which applies to radioactive nuclei
in just the same way as it applies to an apple core. There is no other way to make radioactive
excesses safe but to find a continuing new home for them.
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Zero Waste thinking should be applied to processes as well as products. You need to keep the entire
manufacturing process in mind, not just the profitability or materials conservation of one single
sector.
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The greatest waste of resources is not found in simple dumping but in the needless repetition
of creating products which were designed for one-trip wasting. The efforts of creating
factories, designs, departments, refineries and machinery and the need for employing human
labor is where the greatest waste is encountered. The humans needed for all of this needless
manufacturing and services use up all of the inputs that all people make use of. This is where
the major waste of clean water, air and soil arises and it will be just as true if all
materials are recycled and nothing goes into a dump.
If you want to see how these principles are applied to an actual ZW design project, click here
This is the one principle which cuts across all the others. Design for an entire lifecycle or ecology or an entire industry or an entire commerce or society. Do not design piecemeal, just to improve one product, replace one material or solve one limited local problem but look at the entire picture, including all the implications of your changes far from where they are being implemented. Ask where all input products are being manufactured, how wasteful they are, how those manufacturing processes can be changed in turn and what effect your change has on the reutilization of your products.
- An example: the banning of plastic bags. Do not think in terms of bans but do think in terms of an alternative way to accomplish the same thing (except better). The focus must be on the ALTERNATIVE, not on the ban. Banning things is a lazy way to greenwash your efforts, compared to the difficulty of designing an alternative. Do not accept a biodegradable alternative. Biodegradable plastic is no better than conventional plastic. It does not embody any inherent design for reuse - in fact - it implies the difficult, expensive and labor intensive creation of a highly functional molecule followed by its quick destruction.
- Even when high functional reuse is no longer possible, and an article must be reduced to its component materials for their reuse, employ higher level design to make that operation more effective. Prime examples are metals and plastics because either of them may consist of thousands of possible alloys. Keeping track of their exact composition is essential to their reuse.
- Materials that are formed by careful and expensive molecular design (such as plastics or alloys) are high function items. Any method which destroys molecular organization is a destruction method, even if it masquerades as material recycling. Compostability is never a reuse method for highly organized molecules. Biodegradable plastics are primarily a clever substitution of destruction (greenwashing) under the guise of reuse thru composting.
- Composting is a method for recapturing natural nutrient values from very complex natural products. It has no role in treating anything else. Composting is not a special add-on concept but is the normal Zero Waste response to the need for designing closed agricultural cycles.
- Some examples: The use of glues to cement plastic to metal or to wood as a cosmetic or protective cover or veneer. The use of mortar (cement) to build brick structures (is there a better way to join bricks together?). The use of metallic plating on other metals (e.g. gold on copper for circuit boards). As always, these may be critical structures for which no obvious alternative is easily found.
Who is in charge here? No one!
- Emphasize that every owner of an article retains responsibility for the next reuse of that article until the next owner has assumed responsibility, including the obligation to preserve information. Allow no zone of irresponsibility, such as a garbage can or transfer station, unless someone is in charge committed to reuse and conservation.
- Universal reuse will demand experts and expertise, particularly with the more technical kinds of items but even with ordinary items. It is, unfortunately, no more of a catchall industry for people of mental handicaps than any other technical industry. It is only the handling of garbage, and their lowgrade form of recycling called diversion, which require no knowledge or intelligence.
- Reuse is a technically demanding and advanced industry. The answers aren't simple. Often decisions have to be made about intertwined life cycles or the right time to abandon a function or to reconstitute it thru repair or upgrade. You will not be able to answer every challenge: "So what do I do with xxxxx?" Get comfortable with the difficulties. Challenge everyone to find their own, tentative but innovative solutions to designing in reuse. The exercise will convince skeptics that reuse is not all that difficult to design for, once one abandons the notion of the ever welcoming dump.
- Garbage collection is not a public service. The encouragement of garbage creation thru collection and dumping does dreadful harm to society. It needs to be eliminated, not honored as a service. Municipalities should not be contracting for it. The garbage industry should be forced to compete in the public marketplace, without subsidies, like every other industry, for as long as it still exists.
- The money that is wasted on garbage collection and dumping is money that is spent to destroy our planet. We should be removing that money from garbage collection and applying it to Zero Waste solutions and research. There is a huge amount of money available for research into Zero Waste, but it is being squandered today on garbage collection.
- The study of garbage generation, dumping practices and other trivia of the garbage industry is not the business of the recycling industry, except insofar as it helps in the elimination of such practices. You will repeatedly be expected by government and the public to involve yourself in solving 'waste issues', as though finding a place to dump garbage is an environmental problem. This is usually simple ignorance, not malice, so gently but firmly educate the public about the difference between garbage and universal reuse.
- Collection is neither recycling nor reuse! Simply putting "recyclables" into a separate bag is not recycling. Until a specific item has an effective and operational reuse pathway, it is not reused. Just reducing the amount of something going into a dump is not a Zero Waste success. Extending the life of a dump is not a Zero Waste success. Zero Waste successes are not measured at the dump but at the design, reuse or repair facility.
- The measures used for garbage are not valid for measuring Zero Waste progress. The primary measure for success in reuse is the value of the assembled goods that are reused, not the "amount" of their contained materials, not their weight and not their volume. Those are measures of garbage, but irrelevant to Zero Waste.
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"Do not destroy the world unless you have something better to replace it with."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Poetry As Insurgent Art Do not fight against the darkness. First find a spark of light. Maharishi Yogi |
- The greatest waste of resources is not found in simple dumping but in the needless repetition of creating products which were designed for one-trip wasting. The efforts of creating factories, designs, departments, refineries and machinery and the need for employing human labor is where the greatest waste is encountered. The humans needed for all of this needless manufacturing and services use up all of the inputs that all people make use of. This is where the major waste of clean water, air and soil arises and it will be just as true if all materials are recycled and nothing goes into a dump.
If you want to see how these principles are applied to an actual ZW design project, click here