waste management

Waste management is the collection, transport, processing, recycling or disposal, and monitoring of waste materials. Concern over environment is being seen a massive increase in recycling globally which has grown to be an important part of modern civilization. The consumption habits of modern consumerist lifestyles are causing a huge global waste problem. Industrialization and economic growth has produced more amounts of waste, including hazardous and toxic wastes. There is a growing realization of the negative impacts that wastes have had on the local environment (air, water, land, human health etc.)

Waste management is the collection of all thrown away materials in order to recycle them and as a result decrease their effects on our health, our surroundings and the environment and enhance the quality of life. Waste management practices differ for developed and developing nations, for urban and rural areas, and for residential and industrial producers. Waste Management flows in a cycle: monitoring, collection, transportation, processing, disposal or recycle. Through these steps a company can effectively and responsibly manage waste output and their positive effect they have on the environment.

Waste generation per capita has increased and is expected to continue to climb with growing population, wealth, and consumerism throughout the world. Approaches to solving this waste problem in a scalable and sustainable manner would lead us to a model that uses waste as an input in the production of commodities and value monetized, making waste management a true profit centers.

The conversion of waste as a potential source of energy has a value as a supplemental feedstock for the rapidly developing bio-fuels sector. A variety of new technologies are being used and developed for the production of biofuels which are capable of converting wastes into heat, power, fuels or chemical feedstock.

Thermal Technologies like gasification, pyrolysis, thermal depolymerisation, plasma arc gasification, and non–thermal technologies like anaerobic digestion, fermentation etc. are a number of new and emerging technologies that are able to produce energy from waste and other fuels without direct combustion. Biodegradable wastes are processed by composting, vermi-composting, anaerobic digestion or any

Other appropriate biological processing for the stabilization of wastes. Recycling of materials like plastics, paper and metals should be done for future use.

There is a clear need for the current approach of waste disposal in India that is focussed on municipalities and uses high energy/high technology, to move more towards waste processing and waste recycling (that involves public-private partnerships, aiming for eventual waste minimization - driven at the community level, and using low energy/low technology resources.
Avoidance and reduction methods
Main article: Waste minimization
An important method of waste management is the prevention of waste material being created, also known as waste reduction. Methods of avoidance include reuse of second-hand products, repairing broken items instead of buying new, designing products to be refillable or reusable (such as cotton instead of plastic shopping bags), encouraging consumers to avoid using disposable products (such as disposable cutlery), removing any food/liquid remains from cans, packaging, ... and designing products that use less material to achieve the same purpose (for example, light weighting of beverage cans)
Technologies
Traditionally the waste management industry has been slow to adopt new technologies such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, GPS and integrated software packages which enable better quality data to be collected without the use of estimation or manual data entry.
Technologies like RFID tags are now being used to collect data on presentation rates for curb-side pick-ups.
Benefits of GPS tracking is particularly evident when considering the efficiency of ad hoc pick-ups (like skip bins or dumpsters) where the collection is done on a consumer request basis.
Integrated software packages are useful in aggregating this data for use in optimisation of operations for waste collection operations.
Rear vision cameras are commonly used for OH&S reasons and video recording devices are becoming more widely used, particularly concerning residential services

Done by- Ayush Dowerah 8C D-2399