Here’s a story. One Sunday morning a few years back, two friends ordered fries and coffee from a fast food restaurant. The fries came with sachets of ketchup; the coffee, with red plastic stirrers. While one of them reaches out across the table for the stirrer, the eco-warrior friend quickly nudged the other friend’s hand accompanied by a gesture suggesting she does not want her using the p-l-a-s-t-i-c stirrer. After much discussion about using it before it goes to waste or not using it and it still goes to waste, she did not, much to her friend’s relief. Both stirrers, however, went to the bin.
The fault in our systems
In an attempt to contribute to the plastic battle, many people have put in concious efforts in their lifestyle, followed sustainable practices, and stock up on things that basically screams biodegradable, reusable, recyclable, name it. These reusables have been in the rise that capitalists have joined the bandwagon of mass-producing them. While there is nothing wrong with using reusables, it has become a thing for priviledged individuals who can afford because these BPA-free reusables are not exactly cheap.
Developing countries whose population are born into a system highly dependent on plastic packaging have sachet economies that the poor can barely avoid buying sacheted necessities. Community bans on single-use plastics are being implemented, and while these efforts cannot be invalidated, these can hurt the poor and hurt people’s convenience.
An alternative? Revamping our long-lived reliance on linear economy and switching to circular economy through sustainable innovations.
A circular economy can be described as minimizing non-reusable wastes by optimizing resource recycling, innovating products/design, and streamlining waste usage with the intention to maintain the economic value of all resources and products over a long period of time. Ideally, what conventionally turns to waste can be utilized as resource material to create new products through viable recyling.
Putting this perspective in countries producing thousands of tons of plastic waste daily, this means that giant companies have to revolutionize the way they manufacture sachets. In 2017, Unilever made headlines about testing its recycling technology – Creasolv – that produces plastics designed to be reused into new sachets and creates new sachets from the ones recovered in dumpsites.
DB Export Beer Bottle Sand also went viral for their technology that turns bottles into sand; the recycled sand can then be used to make new bottles with less energy consumption or be used in construction. The same applies to infinitely recycling the most circular material – aluminum. These sustainable innovations would result to less plastics, glass bottles and aluminum containers in our landfills, taking us a step closer to achieving a true circular economy.
Maximizing these technologies’ capacity requires interdisciplinary approach from different stakeholders: community efforts on waste collection and segregation especially in places where incinerations are prohibited, financial incentives to collectors, legal framework compelling giant industries to follow suit, and providing premiums to make these technologies scaleable.
The unavoidable by-products
The phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” holds true for the Kalundborg symbiosis – an industrial symbiosis wherein by-products of an industry are used as resources by other industries. In Kalundborg, the facilities connected by pipelines include an oil refinery, a manufacturing plant, a power plant and a biotechnology facility exchanging beneficial ‘wastes’.This symbiosis that has been in place for decades has been successful through the collaborations of Kalundborg municipality and different industries.
If this symbiosis and aforementioned technologies are scaled globally, with proper intervention from communities, government and private entitites, a circular economy is not a far-fetched possibility.
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This blog has been submitted to the 2019 ISWA YPG Blog-writing Competition. The ISWA Young Professionals Group is dedicated to (and coordinated by) young professionals in order to encourage them to be proactive and support them in building their careers in the waste industry.
#YPGblog2019 #ISWAClosingDumpsites
PepperMench. 