Waste Not, Want Not

"The US alone produced 483 million tons of solid waste in 2002 and per capita municipal solid waste rates are still climbing, despite the fact that more than 100 million Americans now recycle... Recovery and recycling are ranked as the lowest priorities, yet energy recovery and recycling programs have blossomed across the continent, while little has been done to promote source reduction or material reuse."
-Roseland "Waste Reduction and Recycling"

This is one of the first problems addressed in Towards Sustainable Communities where community capital is already a positive for this problem. Individuals and communities have become increasingly conscious towards recycling thanks in part to strong eduction movements and economic incentives in some areas. However, recycling only attacks part of the waste problem in this country. As Giradet points out in "The Metabolism of Cities", a natural ecosystem has an "essentialy circular metabolism", where in the output of one organism is an input for another and this becomes a cycle for birth and rebirth. Whereas, in a city "metabolism is esentially linear", resources come into the city and vast amount of waste are released, and although a growing proportion of that waste is recycled, the resources being consumed are only increasing, countering the positive effects of recycling.

So, how can it be that we as a society have become more conscious about recycling materials, but waste continues to grow. Roseland lends much of that blame to the production cycle of many consumable goods. "Most waste production originates in the manufacturing and distribution phases of production of consumer products."

Shipping, manufacturing, and distribution have led to ridiculous practices, which only increase the amount of waste flowing into our urban ecosystems. As a society, "We are far better at making waste than at making products. For every 100 pounds of products we manufacture in the United States, we create at least 3,200 pounds of waste."-Hawken 1997. These practices however, are not economically stable for the businesses that promote these ridiculously wasteful schemes. With the rising cost of fossil fuels; paper products, shipping costs, and plastics will all increase, forcing industry to change practices, and in effect reducing waste and creating a more sustainable environment. Luckily however, there are many people already working on waste reduction even in some of the simplest everyday packaging/delivery methods; pizza.


A green pizzabox may not seem like a big deal, but the fact that numerous chains are considering or have adopted this technology shos the direction in which industry is heading, and with many foreign cities, like Cairo, searching for methods to become zero waste environments, hopefully it will not be long until the vast majority of everyday materials we use do not need to be disposed of, but simply transferred to some other use.