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The Transition from Waste Management to Resource Management in North America - Free to SWANA Members
John H. Skinner, Ph.D., Executive Director and CEO, SWANA
Free for SWANA Members. Not a member? Click here to register today!
One of the biggest opportunities facing the waste management industry today is to make a transition from a traditional waste disposal oriented industry to a comprehensive resource management industry. This will require solid waste managers to think of themselves as suppliers of raw material and energy resources rather than managers or disposers of discarded wastes. Their goal should be to produce high quality and reliable supplies of recycled materials and recovered energy that meets their customers’ requirements at prices that are competitive with other material and energy supplies.
There are a number of indications that that this transition is actually underway. These include:
- Product stewardship and extended producer responsibility programs that recognize that discarded products are in fact potential material and energy resources
- Zero Waste programs that understand that waste generation represents an economic inefficiency that can be eliminated
- Expanded recycling and composting to recover material resources from discarded wastes
- Waste-to-Energy facilities that recover renewable energy form solid waste
- Conversion Technologies such as gasification and pyrolysis that have the potential to derive the highest resource value from waste materials
- Landfill gas recovery systems that recover resources even after wastes has been disposed
- Programs that incorporate resource recovery as integral parts of material resource- renewable energy strategies.
This presentation will describe how solid waste managers across North America are shifting the paradigm from a disposal perspective to a sustainable resource management perspective
Limited Space Available
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