Solid Waste Management – causes, effects and control measures of urban and industrial wastes. Role of an individual in prevention of pollution

Solid Waste Management – causes, effects and control measures of urban and industrial wastes. Role of an individual in prevention of pollution

Waste(s) (also known as rubbish, trash, refuse, garbage, junk, and litter) is unwanted or useless materials.
Waste is linked to people development. Litter refers to waste disposed of improperly.

According to the Basel Convention, United Nations Environment Programme "Wastes are materials that are not prime products (that is products produced for the market) for which the initial user has no further use in terms of his/her own purposes of production, transformation or consumption, and of which he/she wants to dispose. Wastes may be generated during the extraction of raw materials, the processing of raw materials into intermediate and final products, the consumption of final products, and other human activities. Residuals recycled or reused at the place of generation are excluded."

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Waste refers to materials that are not prime products (that is, products produced for the market) for which the generator has no further use in terms of his/her own purposes of production, transformation or consumption, and of which he/she wants to dispose."

European Union defined waste as "an object the holder discards, intends to discard or is required to discard."

Costs of waste generated by society

Environmental costs
Waste attracts rodents and insects which harbour gastrointestinal parasites, yellow fever, worms, the plague and other conditions for humans. Exposure to hazardous wastes, particularly when they are burned, can cause various other diseases including cancers. Waste can contaminate surface water, groundwater, soil, and air which causes more problems for humans, other species, and ecosystems. Waste treatment and disposal produces significant green house gas (GHG) emissions, notably methane, which are contributing significantly to global climate change.

Social costs
Waste management is a significant environmental justice issue. Many of the environmental burdens cited above are more often borne by marginalized groups, such as racial minorities, women, and residents of developing nations. NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) is a popular term used to describe the opposition of residents to a proposal for a new development close to them. However, the need for expansion and site of waste treatment and disposal facilities is increasing worldwide. There is now a growing market in the transboundary movement of waste, and although most waste that flows between countries goes between developed nations, a significant amount of waste is moved from developed to developing nations.

Economic costs
The economic costs of managing waste are high, and are often paid for by municipal governments. Money can often be saved with more efficiently designed collection routes, modifying vehicles, and with public education. Environmental policies such as “pay as you throw” can reduce the cost of management and reduce waste quantities. Waste recovery (that is, recycling, reuse) can curb economic costs because it avoids extracting raw materials and often cuts transportation costs. The location of waste treatment and disposal facilities often has an impact on property values due to noise, dust, pollution, unsightliness, and negative stigma. The informal waste sector consists mostly of waste pickers who scavenge for metals, glass, plastic, textiles, and other materials and then trade them for a profit. This sector can significantly alter or reduce waste in a particular system, but other negative economic effects come with the disease, poverty, exploitation, and abuse of its workers.

Education and awareness
Education and awareness in the area of waste and waste management is increasingly important from a global perspective of resource management.

In living organisms, waste is the unwanted substances or toxins that are expelled from them. More commonly, waste refers to the materials that are disposed of in a system of waste management.
Waste is directly linked to human development, both technologically and socially. The compositions of different wastes have varied over time and location, with industrial development and innovation being directly linked to waste materials. Examples of this include plastics and nuclear technology. Some components of waste have economical value and can be recycled once correctly recovered.
Waste is sometimes a subjective concept, because items that some people discard may have value to others. It is widely recognized that waste materials are a valuable resource, whilst there is debate as to how this value is best realized.

There are many waste types defined by modern systems of waste management, notably including:

• municipal solid waste (MSW)
• construction waste and demolition waste (C&D)
• institutional waste, commercial waste, and industrial waste (IC&I)
• medical waste (also known as clinical waste)
• hazardous waste, radioactive waste, and electronic waste
• biodegradable waste

Causes for Solid Waste Generation –
1. Population increase
2. Growing Urbanization
3. Industry
4. Mining
5. Transport

Waste management is the collection, transport, processing, recycling or disposal, and monitoring of waste materials. The term usually relates to materials produced by human activity, and is generally undertaken to reduce their effect on health, the environment or aesthetics. Waste management is also carried out to recover resources from it. Waste management can involve solid, liquid, gaseous or radioactive substances, with different methods and fields of expertise for each.

Waste management practices differ for developed and developing nations, for urban and rural areas, and for residential and industrial producers. Management for non-hazardous residential and institutional waste in metropolitan areas is usually the responsibility of local government authorities, while management for non-hazardous commercial and industrial waste is usually the responsibility of the generator.

Methods of disposal
Integrated waste management
Integrated waste management using LCA (life cycle analysis) attempts to offer the most benign options for waste management. For mixed MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) a number of broad studies have indicated that waste administration, then source separation and collection followed by reuse and recycling of the non-organic fraction and energy and compost/fertilizer production of the organic waste fraction via anaerobic digestion to be the favoured path. Non-metallic waste resources are not destroyed as with incineration, and can be reused/ recycled in a future resource depleted society.

Plasma gasification
Plasma is a highly ionized or electrically charged gas. An example in nature is lightning, capable of producing temperatures exceeding 12,600 °F (6,980 °C). A gasifier vessel utilizes proprietary plasma torches operating at +10,000 °F (5,540 °C) (the surface temperature of the Sun) in order to create a gasification zone of up to 3,000 °F (1,650 °C) to convert solid or liquid wastes into a syngas. When municipal solid waste is subjected to this intense heat within the vessel, the waste’s molecular bonds break down into elemental components. The process results in elemental destruction of waste and hazardous materials.

Landfill
Disposing of waste in a landfill involves burying the waste, and this remains a common practice in most countries. Landfills were often established in abandoned or unused quarries, mining voids or borrow pits. A properly designed and well-managed landfill can be a hygienic and relatively inexpensive method of disposing of waste materials. Older, poorly designed or poorly managed landfills can create a number of adverse environmental impacts such as wind-blown litter, attraction of vermin, and generation of liquid leachate. Another common byproduct of landfills is gas (mostly composed of methane and carbon dioxide), which is produced as organic waste breaks down anaerobically. This gas can create odour problems, kill surface vegetation, and is a greenhouse gas.
Design characteristics of a modern landfill include methods to contain leachate such as clay or plastic lining material. Deposited waste is normally compacted to increase its density and stability, and covered to prevent attracting vermin (such as mice or rats). Many landfills also have landfill gas extraction systems installed to extract the landfill gas. Gas is pumped out of the landfill using perforated pipes and flared off or burnt in a gas engine to generate electricity.

Incineration
Incineration is a disposal method that involves combustion of waste material. Incineration and other high temperature waste treatment systems are sometimes described as "thermal treatment". Incinerators convert waste materials into heat, gas, steam and ash.
Incineration is carried out both on a small scale by individuals and on a large scale by industry. It is used to dispose of solid, liquid and gaseous waste. It is recognized as a practical method of disposing of certain hazardous waste materials (such as biological medical waste). Incineration is a controversial method of waste disposal, due to issues such as emission of gaseous pollutants.
Incineration is common in countries such as Japan where land is scarcer, as these facilities generally do not require as much area as landfills. Waste-to-energy (WtE) or energy-from-waste (EfW) is broad terms for facilities that burn waste in a furnace or boiler to generate heat, steam and/or electricity. Combustion in an incinerator is not always perfect and there have been concerns about micro-pollutants in gaseous emissions from incinerator stacks. Particular concern has focused on some very persistent organics such as dioxins, furans, PAHs,... which may be created within the incinerator and afterwards in the incinerator plume which may have serious environmental consequences in the area immediately around the incinerator. On the other hand this method or the more benign anaerobic digestion produces heat that can be used as energy.

Recycling
The popular meaning of ‘recycling’ in most developed countries refers to the widespread collection and reuse of everyday waste materials such as empty beverage containers. These are collected and sorted into common types so that the raw materials from which the items are made can be reprocessed into new products. Material for recycling may be collected separately from general waste using dedicated bins and collection vehicles, or sorted directly from mixed waste streams.
The most common consumer products recycled include aluminum beverage cans, steel food and aerosol cans, HDPE and PET bottles, glass bottles and jars, paperboard cartons, newspapers, magazines, and corrugated fiberboard boxes.
PVC, LDPE, PP, and PS are also recyclable, although these are not commonly collected. These items are usually composed of a single type of material, making them relatively easy to recycle into new products. The recycling of complex products (such as computers and electronic equipment) is more difficult, due to the additional dismantling and separation required.

Sustainability
The management of waste is a key component in a business' ability to maintaining ISO14001 accreditations. Companies are encouraged to improve their environmental efficiencies each year. One way to do this is by improving a company’s waste management with a new recycling service. (such as recycling: glass, food waste, paper and cardboard, plastic bottles etc.)

Biological reprocessing
Waste materials that are organic in nature, such as plant material, food scraps, and paper products, can be recycled using biological composting and digestion processes to decompose the organic matter. The resulting organic material is then recycled as mulch or compost for agricultural or landscaping purposes. In addition, waste gas from the process (such as methane) can be captured and used for generating electricity and heat (CHP/cogeneration) maximizing efficiencies. The intention of biological processing in waste management is to control and accelerate the natural process of decomposition of organic matter.

There is a large variety of composting and digestion methods and technologies varying in complexity from simple home compost heaps, to small town scale batch digesters, industrial-scale enclosed-vessel digestion of mixed domestic waste (see Mechanical biological treatment). Methods of biological decomposition are differentiated as being aerobic or anaerobic methods, though hybrids of the two methods also exist.

Anaerobic digestion of the organic fraction of MSW Municipal Solid Waste has been found to be in a number of LCA analysis studies to be more environmentally effective, than landfill, incineration or pyrolisis. The resulting biogas (methane) though must be used for cogeneration (electricity and heat preferably on or close to the site of production) and can be used with a little upgrading in gas combustion engines or turbines. With further upgrading to synthetic natural gas it can be injected into the natural gas network or further refined to hydrogen for use in stationary cogeneration fuel cells. Its use in fuel cells eliminates the pollution from products of combustion (SOx, NOx, pariculates, dioxin, furans, PAHs...).

Energy recovery
The energy content of waste products can be harnessed directly by using them as a direct combustion fuel, or indirectly by processing them into another type of fuel. Recycling through thermal treatment ranges from using waste as a fuel source for cooking or heating, to anaerobic digestion and the use of the gas fuel, to fuel for boilers to generate steam and electricity in a turbine. Pyrolysis and gasification are two related forms of thermal treatment where waste materials are heated to high temperatures with limited oxygen availability. The process usually occurs in a sealed vessel under high pressure. Pyrolysis of solid waste converts the material into solid, liquid and gas products. The liquid and gas can be burnt to produce energy or refined into other chemical products (chemical refinery). The solid residue (char) can be further refined into products such as activated carbon. Gasification and advanced Plasma arc gasification are used to convert organic materials directly into a synthetic gas (syngas) composed of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The gas is then burnt to produce electricity and steam. An alternative to pyrolisis is high temperature and pressure supercritical water decomposition (hydrothermal monophasic oxidation).

Avoidance and reduction methods
An important method of waste management is the prevention of waste material being created, also known as waste reduction. Methods of avoidance include reuse of second-hand products, repairing broken items instead of buying new, designing products to be refillable or reusable (such as cotton instead of plastic shopping bags), encouraging consumers to avoid using disposable products (such as disposable cutlery), removing any food/liquid remains from cans, packaging and designing products that use less material to achieve the same purpose (for example, lightweighting of beverage cans).

Waste handling and transport
Waste collection methods vary widely among different countries and regions. Domestic waste collection services are often provided by local government authorities, or by private companies in the industry. Some areas, especially those in less developed countries, do not have a formal waste-collection system.

Waste management concepts
There are a number of concepts about waste management which vary in their usage between countries or regions. Some of the most general, widely used concepts include:

Waste hierarchy - The waste hierarchy refers to the "3 Rs" reduce, reuse and recycle, which classify waste management strategies according to their desirability in terms of waste minimization. The waste hierarchy remains the cornerstone of most waste minimization strategies. The aim of the waste hierarchy is to extract the maximum practical benefits from products and to generate the minimum amount of waste.

Extended producer responsibility - Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a strategy designed to promote the integration of all costs associated with products throughout their life cycle (including end-of-life disposal costs) into the market price of the product. Extended producer responsibility is meant to impose accountability over the entire lifecycle of products and packaging introduced to the market. This means that firms which manufacture, import and/or sell products are required to be responsible for the products after their useful life as well as during manufacture.

Polluter pays principle - the Polluter Pays Principle is a principle where the polluting party pays for the impact caused to the environment. With respect to waste management, this generally refers to the requirement for a waste generator to pay for appropriate disposal of the waste.