Waste

waste disposal plant

Waste (or wastes) are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance that is discarded after primary use or is worthless, defective, and of no use.

Waste in a bin

It may be no longer useful as it has served its purpose, and at the end of the process have no further use, and is generally discarded. It is unwanted material that people have thrown away. It is often also called trash, garbage, rubbish, or junk. It can be solid, liquid, or gas, or it can be waste heat. There are many different kinds of waste. Garbage is the waste we produce daily in our homes, including old or unwanted food, chemical substances, paper, broken furniture, used containers, and other things.

When waste is a liquid or gas, it can be called an emission. This is usually pollution. Sanitation is the proper handling of human waste.

Waste can also be something abstract (something that you cannot touch), for example, "a waste of time" or "wasted opportunities". When people use the words waste or wasted in this way, they are saying (directly or indirectly) that something has been used badly (using too much of it or using it incorrectly).

Waste management

Waste management or waste disposal is the process and actions that we take to manage waste from it start point to when we finally throw or dispose them away. This process includes collection, transport, treatment and disposal^[1] of waste, together with monitoring of the waste management process and waste related laws, technologies and economic mechanisms.

Waste management deals with all types of waste, which include industrial, biological, household, municipal, organic, biomedical, radioactive wastes. Waste poses threats to human health. Health issues are linked with the entire process of waste management. Health issues can also arise indirectly or directly: directly through the handling of solid and liquid wastes, and indirectly through the consumption of water, soil, breathing, and food.

The purpose of waste management is to reduce the dangerous effects of such waste on the environment and human health. A big part of waste management deals with municipal solid wasted, which is created by industrial, commercial, and household activity. Waste management are not the same across every country (developed and developing nations); regions (urban and rural areas) and residential and industrial sectors can all take different methods.

People have thrown away waste in heaps for thousands of years. In modern homes and businesses, garbage is normally placed in waste containers of some sort. It is then moved to the streets, where it can be collected and taken to a place designed to hold, destroy, or recycle garbage. Some waste materials, such as paper, wood, glass, metals, and plastic containers, can be recycled (reused). Materials that cannot be recycled are either burned (incinerated) or heaped into landfills.

Plant matter, such as fruit and vegetable scraps, is biodegradable. It can usually be heaped into a compost, where it will decompose relatively quickly. This kind of waste is often called "wet" or "green" waste.

Very often, waste is not collected in containers. It may instead be thrown onto the ground or dumped somewhere. This is called littering.

Effective 'Waste Management' involves the practice of '7R' - 'R'efuse, 'R'educe', 'R'euse, 'R'epair, 'R'epurpose, 'R'ecycle and 'R'ecover. Amongst these '7R's, the first two ('Refuse' and 'Reduce') relates to the non-creation of waste - by refusing to buy non-essential products and by reducing consumption. The next two ('Reuse' and 'Repair') refers to increasing the usage of the existing product, with or without the substitution of certain parts of the product. 'Repurpose' and 'Recycle' involves maximum usage of the materials used in the product. And 'Recover' is the least preferred and least efficient waste management practice involving the recovery of embedded energy in the waste material. For example, burning the waste to produce heat (and electricity from heat). Certain non-bio-degradable products are also dumped away as 'Disposal', and this is not a "waste-'management'" practice.

WasteWaste Management Media

Solid waste after being shredded to a uniform size
An art installation created with plastic bottles and other non-biodegradable waste
Onkalo, a deep geological repository for the final disposal of the radioactive waste, located near the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Eurajoki, Finland
Waste generation, measured in kilograms per person per day
'Waste not the waste' sign in Tamil Nadu, India
People who earn their living by collecting and sorting garbage and selling them for recycling (waste pickers), Smokey Mountain, Philippines
Scan of Newport cigarettes found in Olneyville, Rhode Island - 2008
Recycling point at the Gdańsk University of Technology
Containers for selective waste collection at the Gdańsk University of Technology