Zero Waste Hierarchy

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Zero Waste Hier­ar­chy (short, sweet ver­sion):

Redesign
Reduce
Source Sep­a­rate: (reusables, recy­cling, com­post­ing and trash)

• Reuse / Repair
• Recy­cle (mul­ti-stream) ⇒ Mate­r­i­al Recov­ery Facil­i­ty (MRF)
• Com­post ⇒ aer­o­bi­cal­ly com­post clean organ­ic mate­ri­als like food scraps and yard waste to return to soils
• Waste:
  • Waste Com­po­si­tion Research (exam­ine trash to see how the sys­tem can be improved upstream)
  • Mate­r­i­al Recov­ery (mechan­i­cal­ly remove addi­tion­al recy­clables that peo­ple failed to separate)
  • Bio­log­i­cal Treat­ment (aer­o­bic com­post­ing — or, bet­ter yet, anaer­o­bic diges­tion fol­lowed by aer­o­bic com­post­ing — of organ­ic resid­u­als to sta­bi­lize them)
  • Sta­bi­lized Land­fill­ing (bio­log­i­cal treat­ment reduces vol­ume and avoids gas and odor problems)

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Zero Waste Hier­ar­chy (in more detail):

• Redesign
  • Make prod­ucts durable, recy­cled, and recy­clable or compostable
  • Use mate­ri­als which are more envi­ron­men­tal­ly sustainable
• Reduce
  • Tox­i­cs Use Reduction 
    • Reduce amounts of tox­ic chem­i­cals in production
    • Replace tox­ic chem­i­cals with less tox­ic or non-tox­ic alternatives
  • Con­sump­tion Reduction 
    • Reduce per­va­sive adver­tis­ing (espe­cial­ly toward chil­dren, like Chan­nel One in schools)
    • Teach peo­ple to use less, to buy prod­ucts with less pack­ag­ing, and to avoid dis­pos­ables and non-recy­clables products
  • Pack­ag­ing Reduction 
    • includes poly­styrene and PVC plas­tic bans and sin­gle-use paper/plastic bag bans and taxes
• Source Sep­a­rate:
  • Avoid sin­gle stream (paper mixed with bottles/cans) and “one bin for all” (no source separation)
  • Bet­ter sep­a­ra­tion at the source of dis­card­ed mate­ri­als = more valu­able mate­ri­als to market
• Reuse/Repair
  • Man­date decon­struc­tion of buildings
  • Thrift stores & char­i­ty collections
  • Legal­ize wastepick­ing / dump­ster diving
  • Encour­age dis­card exchanges like Freecycle
  • Incen­tivize food recovery
  • Paint recy­cling / exchange
  • Repair cen­ters for bikes, computers/peripherals, fur­ni­ture, appli­ances, etc.
• Recy­cle
  • Dual-stream recy­cling (paper sep­a­rate from glass/metal/plastic) to a Mate­r­i­al Recov­ery Facil­i­ty (MRF)
  • Incen­tivize recy­cling through per-bag util­i­ty pric­ing, called “Pay As You Throw” (PAYT) or “Save Mon­ey and Reduce Trash” (SMART) – this imme­di­ate­ly cuts waste gen­er­a­tion by 44% on average
  • Adopt a bot­tle bill
  • Buy recy­cled and cre­ate local mar­kets for mate­ri­als, espe­cial­ly glass
  • Seek the high­est end-use and avoid “down­cy­cling” (i.e. seg­re­gate office paper from low­er paper grades and oth­er recy­clables, to keep qual­i­ty high)
  • Cre­ate recy­cling pro­grams for elec­tron­ic waste (e‑Stewards cer­ti­fied), house­hold haz­ardous wastes, etc.
  • Resid­u­als from recy­cling (that which can not be recy­cled at a MRF) jump down to the research step below
• Com­post
  • Week­ly curb­side col­lec­tion of recy­clables and organ­ics can be done while decreas­ing the col­lec­tion of trash to every oth­er week (what smells in trash is the com­posta­bles, so this encour­ages composting).
  • Ban clean organ­ics (not sewage sludge!) from land­fills. Sewage sludge, even once digest­ed, does not belong on farm fields or in urban gardens.
  • Clean com­post from food scraps and yard waste can be used in land­scap­ing and non-food agri­cul­ture uses.
• Research
  • On a reg­u­lar basis, do a waste sort and see what remains in the waste stream and feed that into Extend­ed Pro­duc­er Respon­si­bil­i­ty cam­paigns, prod­uct bans and oth­er mea­sures to elim­i­nate these resid­ual mate­ri­als from the waste stream by ensur­ing that they’re dealt with fur­ther up in this hierarchy.
• Mate­r­i­al Recovery 
  • For the remain­ing waste, mechan­i­cal­ly pull out addi­tion­al recy­clables. This uses the sort­ing capa­bil­i­ty of a “Dirty MRF,” or “Mixed Waste Pro­cess­ing” facil­i­ty, but should nev­er be a replace­ment for source sep­a­ra­tion and upstream recy­cling and com­post­ing, as it will get peo­ple out of good recy­cling habits and will degrade the qual­i­ty of recy­clables, low­er­ing their val­ue, and far less will actu­al­ly be recycled.
• Bio­log­i­cal Treatment 
  • The small por­tion that remains, if there is enough organ­ic mate­r­i­al in it, should be sta­bi­lized with aer­o­bic com­post­ing (or, to be more thor­ough, anaer­o­bic diges­tion fol­lowed by aer­o­bic com­post­ing to dry it out). This avoids hav­ing gassy and stinky land­fills. Using diges­tion helps remove all methane gen­er­at­ing poten­tial from the waste, and is the only so-called “waste-to-ener­gy” com­po­nent of a zero waste system.
  • Digest­ed munic­i­pal waste resid­u­als are too con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed to be mar­ket­ed as fer­til­iz­er or soil amendment.
• Sta­bi­lized Land­fill­ing – monofill the sta­bi­lized waste in sep­a­rate land­fill cells at exist­ing landfills
• Ensure prop­er land­fill man­age­ment (don’t mis­man­age the land­fill by man­ag­ing it for ener­gy pro­duc­tion)
  If dis­pos­ing of the sta­bi­lized resid­u­als in a con­ven­tion­al land­fill full of decay­ing organ­ic mate­r­i­al, it’s impor­tant to man­age the land­fill prop­er­ly, as follows:
  • Min­i­mize gas pro­duc­tion: Do not man­age the waste facil­i­ty as an ener­gy facil­i­ty by stim­u­lat­ing gas production. 
    • Keep out liquids 
      • Cov­er the active face of the land­fill to keep out rain­wa­ter, using a tem­po­rary structure
      • Do not recir­cu­late leachate
    • Cap land­fills with per­ma­nent syn­thet­ic cov­ers and install gas col­lec­tion sys­tems in months, not years.
  • Max­i­mize gas collection: 
    • Seg­re­gate organ­ics in land­fills for best gas collection
    • Main­tain high suc­tion on col­lec­tion wells; do not damp down wells or rotate off the wells to stim­u­late methane production
  • Clean the cap­tured gas pri­or to use 
    • Fil­ter tox­ins in the gas into a sol­id medi­um like a car­bon fil­ter; con­tainer­ized and store on-site. 
      • Do not send to car­bon “regen­er­a­tion” or “recy­cling” facil­i­ties (they sim­ply incin­er­ate the cap­tured chem­i­cals, pol­lut­ing the air)
  • The puri­fied gas can be used: 
    • for heat­ing pur­pos­es (burned in a high effi­cien­cy boiler),
    • piped into gas lines,
    • used to make alter­na­tive vehi­cle fuel,
    • used in fuel cells,
    • burned for elec­tric­i­ty in a high effi­cien­cy tur­bine (less prefer­able to uses for heat­ing), or
    • the CO2 and methane can be seg­re­gat­ed and sold as indus­tri­al chem­i­cal feed­stocks (but not for food indus­try use).
• Land­fill gas-to-ener­gy should not be con­sid­ered renew­able (That allows it to under­cut clean sources like wind and solar and puts source reduc­tion, reuse, recy­cling and com­post­ing at a com­pet­i­tive disadvantage.)

The land­fill man­age­ment aspects are nuanced because it’s crit­i­cal to ensure that green­house gas emis­sions from land­fills are avoid­ed, unlike how land­fills are com­mon­ly man­aged today. For a full appre­ci­a­tion of the need for this type of land­fill man­age­ment, please review the mate­ri­als at energyjustice.net/lfg/.