The advent of 21st century has brought many gifts that mankind will cherish, but these gifts have come with a cost. The ease of life, the higher consumption capacities, wasteful attitude and the ever-increasing aspirations have put us in grave danger of losing it all. Our actions have resulted in escalating pressure on the planet and its resources, creating the magnitude of waste we cannot handle.
Our traditional way of managing waste has been the one with less efforts coined as the ‘Linear process’ of waste management. Dumping has been the most widely used term in Linear waste management where a piece of land is used to dump waste. As we progressed from villages to cities, we designated a piece of land in the outskirts of the city to be used as a dumping ground for all our waste.
With the advancing industrialization and geometric expansion of population, waste quantities magnified, and land became a scarce resource. This led us to find other ways of dealing with the waste that we created, like burning, burying underground, throwing it away into the ocean, etc. Today one would look at these and wonder how we could not think of all the problems that would arise due to such activities. Alas, we all have seen the problems of air pollution, land degradation, groundwater pollution and of course the massive ocean (waterbody) pollution spring up as a result of these activities.
Over time we have found ways to reduce our impacts and increase our eco-efficiency of the Linear process. But the problem at hand seems too large to be dealt with such measures.
If we expect to make a difference, we cannot possibly rely on the older methods that are intensive on the existent resources. We need to transform the way we think and manage our waste, our lifestyle and our economy.
A lot of work has been done in the past decade to understand such problems and suggest ways to deal with them. One such school of thought is Circular way of living.
A circular process identifies closed loops based on the concept of maximizing value of resources invested in making products. It believes in avoiding wastage, reducing pollution and recovering resources with a primary focus on upcycling and secondary focus on recycling. The 3 R’s Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are the foundation for this process. Implementation of this concept in waste management resulted in designing the Circular waste management process.
The foundation stone of a circular waste management is the process of Waste Segregation. The waste can only be processed further to derive value if it’s segregated properly into categories of recyclables. The image above shares a glimpse of the journey of waste in a circular system.
The primary segregation of waste is done in 3 categories, viz. Wet waste, Dry waste and Hazardous waste. This waste is then transported to Waste Processing facilities for further processing.
The hazardous waste is either incinerated or buried deep underground. The valuable dry waste gets recycled to form new products whereas the zero-value waste is used as fuel for cement factories. The wet waste can be processed in different ways to obtain products like compost, biogas, char, briquettes and bio-oil. The Inert waste is sent to sanitary landfill for scientific disposal.
In this way, a circular process derives value out of existing resources to avoid the intensive use of new resources for new products. A circular process is more service-oriented than material oriented. It aims at reducing resource use while increasing the services provided.
The effective valuation of a circular process is higher than that of a linear process. This makes it more sustainable and should be a strategy implemented for the future of the planet.
