Waste management

DEFINITION: Policies and procedures for handling the physical by-products of human activity that cannot be reintegrated into the ecological biomass cycle

Waste includes solid, liquid, and airborne substances that are potentially harmful to living organisms. As the human population has grown and the use of manufactured materials has expanded, the disposal of waste has become more challenging, and strategies of waste management have come under increasing scrutiny by environmentalists.

World production of manufactured materials (not counting recycled materials) increased nearly two-and-a-half times between the early 1960s and the end of the twentieth century. In industrialized countries the increase was far greater: The United States, for example, saw an eighteenfold increase in materials production from 1900 to 2000, leading the country to produce 12 percent of the world's waste. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that as of 2018, the average US citizen threw away 4.9 pounds of daily. The EPA also stated that in 2018, over 292 million tons of garbage was generated in the United States. Although the per-person production of rose little more than a pound from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early 2010s, the sharp rise in and expanding industrial base meant greater total accumulations of waste, with the largest percentage of waste originating from high income countries. Furthermore, the types of waste changed over time.

Waste is commonly categorized as domestic (or solid) waste and industrial (or liquid) waste, although the distinction is not absolute. Both may contain toxic substances, but the percentage of toxins in industrial waste is likely to be higher, and the two types of waste are disposed of in different ways. The emitted from industrial processing of materials and vehicle exhaust are additional types of waste, although these are commonly thought of as contributing to air pollution rather than as waste.

Solid Waste

Solid waste is the familiar garbage that households and businesses in the United States have sent to dumps since garbage collection began late in the nineteenth century. In 2018, one of the largest portions of municipal solid waste, 23.05 percent, consisted of paper products, especially newspapers and containers. Food waste comprised 21.59 percent, plastics comprised 12.20 percent, and yard waste and food debris comprised another 12.11 percent. Plastic containers and wrappings, bottles, metals, and appliances are also regularly thrown away, despite increased emphasis on recycling. The American Infrastructure Report Card also reported that in 2023, 35 million tons of hazardous materials that fall under the jurisdiction of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 were being produced annually. Construction waste accounts for a large share of and may contribute a higher proportion of hazardous materials, such as solvents and paint.

Although most of these materials are solid, when dumped together they can soak up rainwater and then ooze chemical-laden liquids. This leachate may filter down into the and pollute nearby streams and wells. If it contains toxic elements, such as lead or mercury from batteries, the can be dangerous to health. The odor from rotting garbage may also foul the air, seldom enough to be harmful but still repellent to people living nearby. It can attract animal scavengers, which may become infected with diseases from the garbage and spread them to other animals or even humans, especially if feces are part of the waste.

In order to combat these effects, sanitary landfills waste on top of plastic linings designed to contain leachate; they then cover each day’s load of garbage under a thin layer of soil. Pipe systems in such landfills disperse methane gas produced by rotting materials. Sanitary landfills are therefore less dangerous to human health or the than most dump sites established in earlier times, but many old, abandoned sites and illegally dumped materials can still pose problems. They may continue to dribble harmful chemicals into groundwater for decades and emit methane, a flammable greenhouse gas.

Measures instituted in attempts to reduce the amount of waste deposited in landfills have had partial success. Recycling has drastically cut the total paper, metal, and glass waste in many US states and in other industrialized countries. The use of garbage disposals and the practice of composting have caused the proportion of organic materials in landfills to decline. However, such reductions have not eliminated solid waste. By the early years of the twenty-first century, cities were finding it increasingly difficult to find room for new landfill sites, even when the space was urgently needed. Stringent regulations concerning the geological composition of landfills reduced the number of usable sites, and increased objections from citizen action committees, known as NIMBY (from “not in my backyard”) groups, also eliminated sites near populated areas. Low-income areas were much more likely to be considered as potential landfill sites. In 2024, the US had approximately 2,600 landfills in use and 10,000 closed landfills; however, technology developed in 2021 to improve recycling gave some environmental advocates hope.

Facilities that incinerated waste, some of which used the resulting heat energy to power electrical generators, also faced objections from environmentalists and others because burning can release health-threatening materials, such as dioxins, into the air. Moreover, a significant proportion of waste, such as appliances and concrete, cannot be eliminated by burning. Tires, too hazardous to burn, float to the surface in landfills, causing continuous problems for waste managers; tires often end up stacked in immense piles that, if accidentally ignited, can burn out of control and create large clouds of black fumes. By 2023, thirty-eight US states had banned tires from landfills for this reason.

Electronic waste, or e-waste, is among the most pressing solid-waste concerns of the twenty-first century. In 2019, 53.6 metric tons of e-waste was generated, and experts predicted this number would continue to rise, reaching 74.7 million metric tons in 2030. The creation of electronic technology requires the use of rare metals in semiconductors, and consumer demand for newer, more powerful devices has continued. Much of the industrialized world's e-waste has been sent to developing countries in Africa and Asia, where the e-waste is taken apart and burned. Dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), flame retardants, and heavy metals are some of the hazardous materials released when e-waste is disassembled and incinerated. While various national regulations and international agreements concerning e-waste exist, trade in e-waste has exploited loopholes and oversights and improper disposal continues.

Innovative methods of solid-waste disposal and resource recovery are being explored. These include more efficient collection systems, processes to recover metals from electronic waste for reuse, and the use of wastes as fuel, as in the use of food wastes in bioreactors. The African continent was praised in 2022 for pioneering e-waste policies and improving the disposal of such waste.

Industrial Waste

The effluent streams of by-products from factories, as well as chemical and refineries, are made up of water, solid filings and cuttings, liquid solvents and oil derivatives, and semisolid sludge. The solid components are usually no more hazardous than household wastes, although medical wastes—particularly tainted blood and used “sharps,” such as needles and scalpels—may pose the additional danger of spreading disease. However, liquids and semiliquids sometimes contain a high proportion of hazardous chemicals. Rain also leaches chemicals, such as cyanide and mercury, out of the smelted from mines. Agricultural fertilizers and pesticides can enter groundwater and streams as well. Because these liquid wastes spread rapidly through waterways and groundwater, they are often collectively known as toxic waste.

Industries in developed countries use all ninety-two naturally occurring elements on the periodic table, and the isotopes of some of these are radioactive. Nuclear weapons manufacturing in particular leaves radioactive debris, but medical procedures that use radioactive tracers and scientific instruments may also create radioactive wastes. This nuclear waste continues to emit for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, and improperly stored radioactive materials have been associated with increased of disease for people, animals, and plants.

In the United States, federal and state regulations brought management under rigorous control during the 1980s and 1990s. Facilities known as secure landfills were designed to contain nonradioactive industrial wastes in tightly lined, self-contained areas. Incinerators reduced the waste to harmless while releasing few or no harmful particulates into the atmosphere. Separate repositories store nuclear wastes deep underground in leak-proof containers.

The public is seldom reassured by such measures, however. Industrial waste totals per year, as measured in 2017, averaged around 7.6 billion tons. Leakage occasionally occurs from secure landfills. Near-zero toxic emissions from means that some toxins do, in fact, escape into the atmosphere. In addition, nuclear repositories may not be catastrophe-proof; for example, an earthquake could crack open containers, releasing radioactive material into groundwater supplies. Although waste managers insist that these dangers are minimal, the news media bring potential problems to public attention, and NIMBYism regularly leads to to the opening of new secure landfills and radioactive waste repositories. State governments often object as well, as was the case when the Nevada legislature stalled the construction of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Many old facilities, built before strict government oversight was instituted, remain in use and could leak toxic materials into the environment undetected. Memories of deadly chemical leaks, such as that discovered at Love Canal in New York in 1976, and of released radioactive material, such as the plutonium that escaped the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, make the public wary of hazardous wastes.

As a result of citizen concern, most new disposal sites are located far from population centers. This has created another peril, however: The waste must be transported, primarily by trucks and trains, to disposal sites. Traffic accidents and train derailments enroute can dump extremely dangerous chemicals straight into bodies of water or the atmosphere. Evacuations of residents near such accidents, while not common, increased during the 1990s. Even if people are rescued, however, plant and animal life is not safeguarded.

Environmental Consequences

Many critics of waste management policies insist that only source reduction—a drastic decrease in the use of raw materials—will make waste disposal safe. Accordingly, during the 1990s, some countries, notably Denmark and Germany, sought to reduce virgin material use by as much as 90 percent by intensifying programs. In the United States, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, widely known as Superfund, sets aside federal funds to pay for cleanups of the most dangerous hazardous waste sites. Other industrialized nations have similar projects. Still, only a fraction of sites receive attention, and until goals are met, household and industrial wastes will continue to swell landfills with environmentally hazardous substances. Illegal dumping of hazardous waste exacerbates the danger.

Scientists disagree about how severely wastes damage the environment, but there is agreement that repercussions are evident and likely to increase. Methane from dumps, smokestack emissions, and vehicle exhaust contain greenhouse gases, which are implicated in global warming. Nutrients released from sewers, as well as from agriculture and mining, degrade the environment of rivers and streams, harming aquatic life and leaving the water unusable without special treatment. Waterborne wastes that reach the ocean, supplemented by ocean dumping of toxic materials, alter and sometimes destroy offshore ecosystems such as coral reefs.

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