Corporate waste managers are in a crisis. More and more companies than ever before are working hard to progress their waste management, decrease their risk, and impel sustainability through circular economic business models. However, due to tectonic shifts in waste policies globally, moving “ahead” is trickier than it had been. It has apparently become impossible in several cases—mainly for materials that are more marginal in value. Due to that fact, it is challenging to say that the quest for recycling and other forms of sustainable disposal even make sense in today’s market or not.
To move forward, companies first require re-evaluating their disposal approaches and mapping out an effective plan. Without overseas recycling and single-stream materials recovery, facilities not being as receptive as they had been before, domestic companies are again put in the place of having to gather what’s valuable from what isn’t. To survive, they must adjust. And what they adjust be supposed to be designed to increase the environmental and financial return of their efforts while, on the contrary, decreasing their liability. The two significant ways to get started in understanding where to focus can be through lifecycle thinking and lifecycle analysis.
Lifecycle Analysis
After generating waste, it’s all about reducing its impacts. As per the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), A lifecycle analysis refers to a widespread method for evaluating environmental impacts across the entire lifecycle of a product system. It includes materials acquisition to manufacturing, use, and final disposition. Not all recycling is created identical. It should be kept in mind that the overall purpose is to reduce various risks arises from waste. It must focus its efforts on those wastes and materials that return the maximum benefit for the investment. Lifecycle analysis, and even the less quantitative lifecycle thinking, is decisive tools in determining this.
Lifecycle Thinking
In the dearth of analysis, companies can employ lifecycle thinking to recognize both “low hanging fruit” and those waste streams that might call for further consideration. Lifecycle thinking is defined as the mental exercise of thinking through materials management's lifecycle on a qualitative basis. For example, recycling metal should constantly be prioritized. Then manufacturing new metal from virgin ores is a tremendous energy and greenhouse gas-intensive process, and, even in the case of the current market disruptions, markets for recovered metals are in general still available.
Another example is Food waste. When biodegradable materials crash in a landfill, they create methane, a greenhouse gas which is 84 times more effective than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. Efforts to lessen food waste or redirect it to composting or anaerobic digestion can garner noteworthy greenhouse gas savings and help an organization stay obedient.
Plastics frequently show a more nuanced scenario. Certain plastics may be harder to recycle, and attempting to do so may result in using a material as a filler instead of a polymer substitute, thus reducing its environmental benefits. On the other hand, moving away from plastics may not always be the best answer either because plastics save packaging weight, be less intensive to manufacture, and extend shelf lives of perishable materials, like food.
Collaborating with waste management solutions and software
While every kind of waste stream has its own distinctions, lifecycle analysis, and lifecycle thinking can assist businesses to discover these considerations and evade forming decisions that shift environmental liabilities and burdens elsewhere in the lifecycle of product and material. To go one step further, collaborating with waste management solutions and software can give professional insight into this area and offer the strategy and capability essential to carry out that strategy. Waste management software helps businesses carry out the processes concerned from the collection to disposal and recycling of waste. This helps businesses to extract greater value from their recycled materials in an ever-shifting market.
Related Report:
Global E-Waste Management Market