Solid Waste Management
As an important part of a community’s infrastructure, solid waste management improves people’s lives. The collection and disposal of trash are one of the most expensive services local governments offer.
As the world’s population grows quickly, concerns about how to deal with the trash are becoming increasingly important for protecting the environment.
Since the industrial revolution, waste has been a major environmental problem worldwide. Tangible things that we humans depend on so much get worse over time. According to the Solid Waste Management in Florida 2014 Annual Report from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the average person in Florida made 9.12 pounds of trash every day in 2014. [1]
You can get an idea of this by multiplying the number of people in each community by the number of people there. This is the fight people who work for the local government face daily.
Waste management is getting more expensive because of more trash and people wanting to put it in landfills, stricter rules for getting rid of the trash, recycling requirements, and unstable markets for recyclable goods.
Solid waste management programs are now carefully made and run, and the government and businesses are very concerned about this.
The traditional way to deal with solid waste has been to limit the amount of solid garbage that can take away from areas where people live. This led to the creation of a highly automated system for collecting and delivering the trash to landfills nearby or shipping it to other cities.
As people grow, landfills fill up, but new facilities are still expensive and hard to find. In addition to limited space, the Environmental Protection Agency says that about 26% of all methane emissions in the United States come from local landfills. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, with a radiative forcing factor about 21 times that of CO2.
The traditional way of dealing with trash can’t keep up with how much trash is being made. So, “efficient removal and disposal” isn’t one of the main goals of waste management. Instead, avoiding trash, keeping it to a minimum, and recycling is.
Sustainable waste management tries to deal with the long-term effects of throwing away trash by recovering resources, recycling and reusing them, and cutting down on the amount of trash thrown away. This includes managing resources in a cost-effective and good way for the environment.
Recycling
Even though reuse and recycling have different meanings, people often mix them up and use them wrong, especially in business. Recycling is the process of making new things out of old things, and recycling is changing the shape of something to make something new out of it.
To recycle something, you usually have to collect the material, move it, clean and sort it, find a new use for it, package it, and sell it. When making a product, it’s better to use recycled materials instead of raw materials.
Reusing something is not recycling because it doesn’t change how it looks. When you reuse something, you use it again, for the same reason or a similar one. People think of reuse as a way to cut down on or stop solid waste since it keeps things and materials from becoming trash.
Recycling is better than reusing because it uses less energy and materials. Reuse projects can also save communities money and reduce the number of greenhouse gases released when usable trash is thrown away or burned.
Reuse programs use various methods to promote and encourage reuse and make recycling easier for both the people who make trash and the people who use it again.
Most of the time, it’s better to use what you already have than buy something new. When it comes to very old refrigerators, clothes washers, dryers, or central heating and air conditioning units, it is often better for the environment to buy new appliances rather than fix them. This is because some older appliances use a lot more energy (and water in the case of clothes washers) to run than new ones. Of course, you should try to recycle the metal from old appliances when you get rid of them.