CONTENTS Introduction 6 Water 8 Food 14 Clothing 22 Paper 28 Plastic 34 Metals 42 Electronics 48 Waste In Space 54 Zero-Waste Future 58 Glossary 60 Index 62 For More Information 64
INTRODUCTION Do you ever feel surrounded by stuff Like when you look around a huge store with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with stuff Or in your own room enclosed by stuff Everywhere stuff Picture your neighborhood on garbage collection day Are the streets overflowing with trash cans and recycling bins Do you wonder what happens to all the stuff that gets thrown away Or maybe you’ve never thought too much about it The garbage gets collected and that’s the end But of course that’s not the end Whether it’s new in the store or trash in the bin everything is part of a life cycle from harvesting raw materials to manufacturing packaging transporting and selling to using and consuming and finally to trashing or recycling This book is about the waste cycle the trashing or recycling stage and how we get there and what we can do about it Your World in a Backpack Do you carry a backpack to school If you think about it a backpack can hold almost everything we need to survive and communicate water food clothing paper and perhaps an electronic communication device In every chapter of this book except when we visit outer space we’re going to take a look at something you might carry in your backpack to school We’ll see how it is produced and what happens to it when it becomes waste 6
The recycling logo represents the continuing life cycle of a product It is an endless loop never causing waste The logo was designed by Gary Anderson in 1970 when he was a student at the University of Southern California He won a contest sponsored by the Container Corporation of America His symbol is now universally recognized Trash Talk When it comes to trash there’s a lot to talk about Some estimates suggest that every one of us will produce 600 times our own weight in waste over the course of our lifetimes But all that talk also includes what innovators see when they look at waste They look at water in the toilet and say Mmm drinking water They see animal poo at the zoo and say Excellent There’s more fuel Scientists and students and regular people the world over are coming up with new ways to harness the power of waste every day Open-Loop versus Closed-Loop Systems When we buy something use it and throw it away that’s what we call an open-loop system Objects are just discarded with no new purpose For a long time that was considered no big deal There were fewer of us on the planet and we had tons of resources to use and endless space to dump the waste Now however that’s not the case Because of our new awareness the future of waste will include more closed-loop systems That means that the end is just a new beginning For example in a closed-loop system recycling can turn a used aluminum can into a new can The heat created from running a recycling facility can be captured and used to heat the building And when you design something to be reused instead of trashed or recycled the waste savings are huge Supply and Demand You may have heard the term supply and demand Let’s say everyone in your class of 20 students wants to own this book Totally understandable That’s demand But the store has only 10 copies That’s supply In this example demand exceeds supply The rules of supply and demand apply to water paper metal everything around you The trick is to balance our personal wants and needs with the world’s supply Each chapter in this book ends with a look at supply and demand and what you can do to reduce reuse or recycle waste Sometimes you can change the world simply by changing your demands More and more we’re learning how what we buy use and throw away affects the planet The great news is that you’re reading this book That means that you care about waste and want to learn more Or some adult is standing nearby and you want to look like you care Either way keep reading 7
