Waste Management Facts and Figures: Key to Sustainability

To make waste management goals attainable, companies need to use their own waste management facts and figures to encourage change, as these point to the inefficiencies in our own society.

Organizations and companies would have to be very specific in understanding waste management facts and figures for them to be sure that they are able to adopt a plan that is sustainable. Very often, an organization's management will only determine that recycling is a societal requirement and will not realize that with proper waste management, significant savings can be accomplished.

By looking at waste management facts and figures, we are able to reflect on the state of our society as being grossly inefficient when it comes to waste disposal and management. With the current waste disposal practices, about 95% of the total volume of wastes go to the landfilla, thereby being ineffective.

A typical landfill is a grossly inefficient way of dealing with our mountains of waste. In some cases, we just bury some of our solid wastes which are non-biodegradable. In addition to the fact that the landfill is an eyesore, it is responsible for the generation of liquid leachate, methane and carbon dioxide and our landfills are very contributor to our greenhouse gas problems.

In some cases, certain jurisdictions gather energy from waste, where waste is burned in a furnace to generate steam, or electricity. While this may seem to be an efficient way of dealing with certain categories of waste, pollutants are a byproduct, both on a localized basis and from a general, environmental perspective.

Global warming will result from methane that's just allowed to leak to the air from a landfill. However, a little-known waste management fact is that there are over 500 landfill-gas-to-energy projects in the United States, estimated to produce enough power through renewable energy to light 1.6 million homes.

If a company makes an effort to gather waste management facts and to determine the correct size and scale of the problem, it will find that a systematic waste management program could save, by some estimates as much as 1% of annual turnover. In addition, these are generally bottom-line savings and long-term, not short-term.

Stakeholders and customers are becoming more and more aware and would insist on sustainable practices as one of the prerequisites before conducting business with any establishment. It follows that a company that is willing to go out of its way to show that it is sustainable, by publishing its waste management facts, can expect an exponential increase in reputation.

Waste management extends throughout a company's product lifecycle and includes supply chain as well. Every company should take a leaf out of Wal-Mart's book and insist that its suppliers become equally as sustainable as the purchasing company.