Waste Prevention
Many businesses, governments, and households are collecting discards
for recycling, and are recovering more materials than ever before. In
fact, over one-fifth of the municipal solid waste generated in our country
is currently recycled or composted.
Despite progress in recycling, however, Americans are still generating
too much waste. Every day, on average, each individual discards about
four pounds of material. These discards burden both the environment and
our economy.
Even recycling, which adds major economic and environmental benefits,
creates economic and environmental costs. The best approach to our solid
waste challenge is to cut the creation of waste in the first place.
Waste that is not created does not have to be managed later. That's why
waste prevention (reducing and reusing) is the ideal solid waste solution.
Waste prevention involves altering the design, manufacture, purchase,
or use of products and materials to reduce the amount and toxicity of
what gets thrown away. Waste prevention is sometimes called destination
reduction because it reduces or eliminates pollution at the destination.
Thus, donating an unwanted computer to a charity (rather than setting
it out for disposal or recycling its parts) is waste prevention. So is
photocopying on both sides of a sheet of paper. Altering material specifications
so that fewer hazardous constituents are used in a manufacturing process
also is waste prevention. Waste prevention activities help shift the nation's
emphasis from pollution cleanup to pollution avoidance. The Environmental Protection Agency provides several documents
on this important program.
The environmental benefits of recycling are well known.
Some of the documents
provided by EPA are Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) files.
For more information about PDFs, visit the About
PDF page.
