subject: Sustainable Resource Planning: The Importance Of Waste Management Facts And Figures [print this page] Minding waste management facts and figures of your own company can help encourage change in the society on a larger scale.
Organizations should be very clear when they determine waste management facts and figures, to make sure that they adopt a plan that will be tenable, as well as sustainable. Most often than not, an establishment's decision-makers would only consider recycling programs to be one of the requirements for the society without realizing that savings for the company can be realized from implementing this initiative too.
Waste management facts generally show us that as a society we are grossly inefficient. 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. We simply bury the solid waste that will not degrade, in some cases, for decades. 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. With the current number of 500 landfill-gas-to-energy projects in the U.S., it is already possible for such to produce enough power using renewable energy that could light up 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.
Remember that customers and other stakeholders are increasingly critical and insist upon measures of sustainability prior to allocating the business to an organization. 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 could extend all throughout an organization's lifecycle, which could even include the supply chain. 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.
