Integrated Waste Management

The dominant concept today in managing waste is known as the integrated waste management (IWM), which is best defined as a set of management alternatives including the three R’s (reduce, recycle, reuse) of waste prevention, incineration, composting, and landfill.

Reduce, Recycle, Reuse

The three R’s of IWM are reduce, recycle, and reuse. The ultimate objective of the three R’s is to reduce the amount of urban and other waste that must be disposed of in landfills, incinerators, or other waste management facilities.

A 50% reduction by weight of urban waste could be facilitated by:

• Better design of packaging to reduce waste, an element of source reduction (10% reduction);
• Establishment of recycling programs (30% reduction) and
• Large scale composting programs (10% reduction).

Above mentioned list suggests that recycling is a major player in the reduction of the urban waste stream. There are two types of recycling for materials such as glass, metals, paper, and plastics. One is closed-loop recycling. It occurs when wastes discarded by consumers are recycled to produce new products of the same type (such as newspaper into newspaper). This reduces pollution and use of virgin resources and saves energy.

The second type is down cycling in which waste materials are converted into different and usually lower quality products.

More realistic for many communities is partial recycling of a specified number of materials that can provide the 30% reduction.