SOLID AND HAZARDOUS WASTE MANAGEMENT

Objectives

16-1 What are solid waste and hazardous waste, and why are they problems?
CONCEPT 16-1 Solid waste contributes to pollution and wastes valuable resources that could be reused or
recycled; hazardous waste contributes to pollution as well as to natural capital degradation, health problems,
and premature deaths.
1. Define solid waste, municipal solid waste, industrial solid waste, and hazardous waste and give
examples of each. Compare more-developed and less-developed countries’ production of hazardous
waste. State the percentage of the world’s solid waste that is produced by the United States.

16-2 How should we deal with solid waste?

CONCEPT 16-2 A sustainable approach to solid waste is first to reduce it, then to reuse or recycle it, and
finally to safely dispose of what is left.
1. Compare waste management and waste reduction approaches to solid and hazardous waste. Discuss
integrated waste management. List the three Rs of waste reduction. List five waste reduction strategies
of industries and communities.
2. Define reduce, reuse and recycling. Note reduce, reuse and recycling strategies.

16-3 Why is reusing and recycling materials so important?

CONCEPT 16-3 Reusing items decreases the consumption of matter and energy resources and reduces
pollution and natural capital degradation; recycling does so to a lesser degree.
1. Distinguish between primary, or closed-loop, recycling and secondary recycling; materials-recovery
facilities of mixed solid waste and a source-separation approach of recycling. Define composting.
Outline the advantages and disadvantages of recycling. List the three most important obstacles to
recycling and reuse in the United States, and suggest ways to overcome them.

16-4 What are the advantages and disadvantages of burning or burying solid waste?
CONCEPT 16-4 Technologies for burning and burying solid wastes are well developed, but burning
contributes to air and water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and buried wastes eventually contribute to
the pollution and degradation of land and water resources.
1. Describe methods for burning solid wastes. List advantages and disadvantages of incineration.
2. Compare sanitary landfills to open dumps. Note the disadvantages and advantages of burying wastes.

16-5 How should we deal with hazardous waste?

CONCEPT 16-5 A more sustainable approach to hazardous waste is first to produce less of it, then to reuse or
recycle it, then to convert it to less hazardous materials, and finally to safely store what is left.
1. List the three priorities of hazardous waste management. Summarize the problem of e-waste. List
common physical, chemical, and biological methods of hazardous waste treatment. List the common
storage options for hazardous waste storage.
2. Name and briefly describe two U.S. hazardous-waste laws. Describe the impact of the Superfund and
how its enforcement can be improved.
3. Discuss the problem of lead toxicity in the United States and globally.

16-6 How can we make the transition to a more sustainable low-waste society?
CONCEPT 16-6 Shifting to a low-waste society requires individuals and organizations to reduce resource use
and to reuse and recycle wastes at local, national, and global levels.
1. Summarize the goals of the environmental justice movement. Describe the effect of international
treaties on regulation of hazardous waste. List four ways to make a transition to a low-waste society.
 Outline

Questions and Concepts

16-1 What are solid waste and hazardous waste, and why are they problems?
A. We throw away huge amounts of useful things and hazardous materials.
1. No waste in natural world because wastes of one organism become nutrients for others as a natural
recycling of nutrients occurs.
2. Modern humans produce huge amounts of waste that go unused and pollute.
3. Solid waste—any unwanted or discarded material we produce that is not a liquid or a gas.
a. Industrial solid waste produced by mines, agriculture, and industries that supply people with
goods and services.
b. Municipal solid waste (MSW), often called garbage or trash, which consists of the combined
solid waste produced by homes and workplaces.
4. Hazardous, or toxic, waste threatens human health or the environment because it is poisonous,
dangerously chemically reactive, corrosive, or flammable.
a. Examples:
i. Industrial solvents.
ii. Hospital medical waste.
iii. Car batteries (containing lead and acids).
iv. Household pesticide products.
v. Dry-cell batteries (containing mercury and cadmium).
vi. Ash from incinerators and coal-burning power plants.
b. Classes of hazardous wastes are:
i. Organic compounds (such as various solvents, pesticides, PCBs, and dioxins).
ii. Nondegradable toxic heavy metals (such as lead, mercury, and arsenic).
iii. Highly radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons
facilities.
c. CASE STUDY: Solid Waste in the United States.
i. The United States leads the world in total solid waste production and in solid waste per
person. 4.6% of the world’s people produce about 33% of the solid waste.

16-2 How should we deal with solid waste?

A. We can burn or bury solid waste or produce less of it.
1. Waste management in which we attempt to manage wastes in ways that reduce their environmental
harm without seriously trying to reduce the amount of waste produced.
2. Waste reduction in which we produce much less waste and pollution, and the wastes we do
produce are considered to be potential resources that can be reused, recycled, or composted.
3. Integrated waste management—a variety of strategies for both waste reduction and waste
management.
B. We can cut solid wastes by reducing, reusing, and recycling.
1. Waste reduction is based on three Rs:
a. Reduce: consume less and live a simpler lifestyle.
b. Reuse: rely more on items that can be used repeatedly instead of on throwaway items, and buy
necessary items secondhand or borrow or rent them.
c. Recycle: separate and recycle paper, glass, cans, plastics, metal, and other items, and buy
products made from recycled materials.
2. Strategies that industries and communities have used to reduce resource use, waste, and pollution.
a. Redesign manufacturing processes and products to use less material and energy.
b. Develop products that are easy to repair, reuse, remanufacture, compost, or recycle.
c. Eliminate or reduce unnecessary packaging.
d. Use fee-per-bag waste collection systems that charge consumers for the amount of waste they
throw away but provide free pickup of recyclable and reusable items.
e. Establish cradle-to-grave responsibility laws that require companies to take back various
discarded consumer products, such as electronic equipment, appliances, and motor vehicles.
16-3 Why is reusing and recycling materials so important?
A. Reuse is an important way to reduce solid waste and pollution, and to save money.
1. Increasingly substituted throwaway items for reusable ones, which has resulted in growing
masses of solid waste.
2. Reuse involves cleaning and using materials over and over and thus increasing the typical life
span of a product.
3. Waste reduction decreases the use of matter and energy resources, cuts pollution and waste,
creates local jobs, and saves money.
4. In many less-developed countries, the poor scavenge in open dumps for food scraps and items
that they can reuse or sell, and are often exposed to toxins and infectious diseases.
5. Reuse strategies in more-developed countries include yard sales, flea markets, secondhand
stores, and online sites such as eBay and craigslist.
6. To encourage people reusable bags, the governments of Ireland, Taiwan, and the Netherlands
tax plastic shopping bags.
7. Australia, France, Italy, and the U.S. city of San Francisco have banned the use of all or most
types of plastic shopping bags.
8. Plastics industry officials have mounted a massive advertising and political campaign to
prevent such bans.
B. There are two types of recycling.
1. Recycling involves reprocessing discarded solid materials into new, useful products.
2. Households and workplaces produce five major types of materials that we can recycle: paper
products, glass, aluminum, steel, and some plastics.
3. Primary, or closed-loop, recycling—materials are recycled into new products of the same
type.
4. Secondary recycling— waste materials converted into different products.
a. Used tires can be shredded and turned into rubberized road surfacing and newspapers can
be reprocessed into cellulose insulation.
5. Key questions about recycling.
a. Do the items that are separated for recycling actually get recycled?
b. Do businesses, governments, and individuals complete the recycling loop by buying
products that are made from recycled materials?
C. Composting is a form of recycling that mimics nature’s recycling of nutrients.
1. Involves using decomposer bacteria to recycle yard trimmings, food scraps, and other
biodegradable organic wastes.
2. The resulting organic material can be added to soil to supply plant nutrients, slow soil erosion,
retain water, and improve crop yields.
3. Homeowners can compost such wastes in simple backyard containers.
4. Some cities in Canada and in many European Union countries collect and compost more than
85% of their biodegradable wastes in centralized community facilities.
5. In the United States, about 3,000 municipal composting programs recycle about 60% of the
yard wastes in the country’s MSW.
D. Recycling has advantages and disadvantages.
1. Whether recycling makes economic sense depends on how we look at its economic and
environmental benefits and costs.
2. Critics of recycling programs argue that recycling is costly and adds to the taxpayer burden in
communities where recycling is funded through taxation.
3. Proponents of recycling point to studies showing that the net economic, health, and
environmental benefits of recycling far outweigh the costs.
4. Critics say that recycling may make economic sense for valuable and easy-to-recycle
materials such as aluminum, paper, and steel.
5. INDIVIDUALS MATTER: Mike Biddle’s Contribution to Recycling Plastics.
a. Mike Biddle and Trip Allen designed a 16-step automated process that separates plastics
from nonplastic items in mixed waste streams and then separates plastics from each other
by type and grade and converts them to pellets that can be used to make new products.
b. The pellets are cheaper than virgin plastics.
E. We can encourage reuse and recycling.
 1. Three factors hinder reuse and recycling.
a. The market prices of almost all products do not include the harmful environmental and
health costs associated with producing, using, and discarding them.
b. The economic playing field is uneven, because in most countries, resource-extracting
industries receive more government tax breaks and subsidies than reuse and recycling
industries.
c. The demand, and thus the price paid, for recycled materials fluctuates, mostly because
buying goods made with recycled materials is not a priority for most governments,
businesses, and individuals.
2. Ways to encourage reuse and recycling:
a. Increase subsidies and tax breaks for reusing and recycling materials and decrease
subsidies and tax breaks for making items from virgin resources.
b. Increase use of the fee-per-bag waste collection system and encourage or require
government purchases of recycled products to help increase demand for and lower prices
of these products.
c. Pass laws requiring companies to take back and recycle or reuse packaging and electronic
waste discarded by consumers.
d. Citizens can pressure governments to require product labeling that lists recycled content
of products and the types and amounts of any hazardous materials they contain.
3. Recycling is popular because it helps to soothe the consciences of people living in a
throwaway society.
4. Reducing resource consumption and reusing resources are more effective prevention
approaches to reducing the flow and waste of resources
5. SCIENCE FOCUS: Bioplastics.
a. Most of today’s plastics are made from organic polymers produced from petroleum based
chemicals (petrochemicals).
b. Biodegradable and more environmentally sustainable bioplastics can be made from some
plants, chicken feathers, and garbage.

16-4 What are the advantages and disadvantages of burning or burying solid waste?
A. Burning solid waste has advantages and disadvantages.
1. Globally, MSW is burned in more than 600 large waste-to-energy incinerators which use the heat
they generate to boil water and make steam for heating water or interior spaces, or for producing
electricity.
2. The United States incinerates only about 12% of its MSW.
a. Incineration has a bad reputation stemming from past use of highly polluting and poorly
regulated incinerators.
b. Incineration competes with an abundance of low-cost landfills in many areas.
3. Advantages of incinerating solid waste :
a. Reduces trash volume
b. Produces energy
c. Concentrates hazardous substances into ash for burial
d. Sale of energy reduces cost
4. Disadvantages:
a. Expensive to build
b. Produces a hazardous waste
c. Emits some CO2 and other air pollutants
d. Encourages waste production
B. Burying solid waste has advantages and disadvantages.
A. About 54%, by weight, of the MSW in the United States is buried in sanitary landfills, compared
to 80% in Canada, 15% in Japan, and 4% in Denmark.
B. Sanitary landfills are where solid wastes are spread out in thin layers, compacted, and covered
daily with a fresh layer of clay or plastic foam, which helps to keep the material dry and reduces
leakage of contaminated water.
C. Open dumps are essentially fields or holes in the ground where garbage is deposited and
sometimes burned.
 1.Rare in more-developed countries.
2.China disposes of about 85% of its solid waste in rural open dumps or in poorly designed and
poorly regulated landfills.
D. Advantages of sanitary landfills:
1. Low operating costs
2. Can handle large amounts of waste
3. Filled land can be used for other purposes
4. No shortage of landfill space in many areas
E. Disadvantages:
1. Noise, traffic, and dust
2. Release greenhouse gases (methane and CO2) unless they are collected
3. Output approach that encourages waste production
4. Eventually leak and can contaminate groundwater
F. R.A. 9003 Ecological Solid Waste Management of the Philippines (Read in separate
document)
16-5 How should we deal with hazardous waste? (READ RA 6969)
A. We can use integrated management of hazardous waste.
1. Integrated management establishes three levels of priority:
a. Produce less.
b. Convert as much of it as possible to less hazardous substances.
c. Put the rest in long-term, safe storage.
2. Industries try to find substitutes for toxic or hazardous materials, reuse or recycle the hazardous
materials within industrial processes, or use them as raw materials for making other products.
3. Industrial hazardous wastes are exchanged through clearinghouses where they are sold as raw
materials for use by other industries.
4. Most e-waste recycling efforts create further hazards and can result in serious threats to other
species.
5. CONNECTIONS: Cell Phones and Endangered African Gorillas.
a. Most cell phones contain coltan, a mineral extracted in the deep forests of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo in central Africa, which is also the home of the endangered lowland
gorillas. Coltan mining has dramatically reduced the gorilla habitat and contributed to the
killing of gorillas to feed the miners.
b. Recycling old cell phones reduces the need to mine coltan and helps save the remaining
lowland gorillas.
B. CASE STUDY: Recycling E-Waste
1. In some countries, workers in e-waste recycling operations are often exposed to toxic chemicals as
they dismantle the electronic trash to extract its valuable metals or other parts that can be sold for
reuse or recycling
2. The United States produces roughly 50% of the world’s e-waste and recycles only about 15% of it.
3. Thirty-five states have banned the disposal of computers and TV sets in landfills and incinerators
and thirteen have laws that make manufacturers responsible for recycling most electronic devices.
4. Some U.S. electronics manufacturers have free recycling programs.
5. Proponents call for a standardized U.S. federal law that makes manufacturers responsible for
taking back all electronic devices they produce and recycling them domestically.
C. We Can Detoxify Hazardous Wastes
1. Biological methods for treatment of hazardous waste may be the wave of the future.
2. Bioremediation employs bacteria and enzymes that help destroy toxic or hazardous substances or
convert them to harmless compounds.
3. Phytoremediation involves using natural or genetically engineered plants to absorb, filter, and
remove contaminants from polluted soil and water.
4. Hazardous wastes can be incinerated to break them down and convert them to harmless or less
harmful chemicals such as carbon dioxide and water.
5. Detoxify hazardous wastes by using a plasma arc torch, somewhat similar to a welding torch, to
incinerate them at very high temperatures.
D. We can store some forms of hazardous waste.
 1. Burial on land or long-term storage of hazardous and toxic wastes should be used only as the last
resort
2. Currently, burial on land is the most widely used method in the United States and in most
countries, largely because it is the least expensive of all methods.
a. The most common form of burial is deep-well disposal.
i. Liquid hazardous wastes are pumped under pressure through a pipe into dry,
porous rock formations far beneath aquifers that are tapped for drinking and
irrigation water.
ii. Cost is low and the wastes can often be retrieved if problems develop.
iii. Problems with deep-well disposal:
iv. Limited number of such sites and limited space within them.
v. Wastes can leak into groundwater from the well shaft or migrate into groundwater
in unexpected ways.
vi. Encourages the production of hazardous wastes.
b. Surface impoundments are ponds, pits, or lagoons in which wastes are stored.
i. May have liners to help contain the waste.
ii. 70% of the storage ponds in the United States have no liners.
iii. Eventually all impoundment liners are likely to leak and could contaminate
groundwater.
c. Liquid and solid hazardous wastes can be put into drums or other containers and buried in
carefully designed and monitored secure hazardous waste landfills.
E. Hazardous Waste Regulation in the Philippines (R.A. 6969)
F. CASE STUDY: Lead Is a Highly Toxic Pollutant.
1. The chemical element lead does not break down in the environment.
2. A potent neurotoxin can harm the human nervous system, especially in young children.
3. Each year, 12,000–16,000 American children younger than age 9 are treated for acute lead
poisoning, and about 200 die.
4. About 30% of the survivors suffer from palsy, partial paralysis, blindness, and mental retardation.
5. Between 1976 and 2004, the percentage of U.S. children ages one to five years with blood lead
levels above the safety standard dropped from 85% to just 1.4%.
a. Banned leaded gasoline in 1976.
b. Banned lead-based paints in 1970.
6. 130–200 million children around the world are at risk of lead poisoning, and 15–18 million
children in less-developed countries have permanent brain damage because of lead poisoning.

16-6 How can we make the transition to a more sustainable low-waste society?
A. Grassroots action has led to better solid and hazardous waste management.
1. Individuals have organized to prevent the construction of hundreds of incinerators, landfills,
treatment plants for hazardous and radioactive wastes, and polluting chemical plants in or near
their communities.
2. If local citizens adopt a “not in my back yard” (NIMBY) approach, the waste will always end up
in someone’s back yard.
3. A call for drastically reducing production of such wastes by emphasizing pollution prevention and
using the precautionary principle.
B. Providing environmental justice for everyone is an important goal.
1. Environmental justice is an ideal whereby every person is entitled to protection from
environmental hazards regardless of race, gender, age, national origin, income, social class, or any
political factors.
2. A larger share of polluting factories, hazardous waste dumps, incinerators, and landfills in the
United States are located in or near communities populated mostly by African Americans, Asian
Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.
3. In general, toxic waste sites in Caucasian communities have been cleaned up faster and more
completely than such sites in African American and Latino communities.
C. International treaties have reduced hazardous waste.
1. For decades, some more-developed countries had been shipping hazardous wastes to less-
developed countries.
 2. Since 1992, international treaty known as the Basel Convention has banned participating countries
from shipping hazardous waste to or through other countries without their permission.
a. In 1995, the treaty was amended to outlaw all transfers of hazardous wastes from industrial
countries to less-developed countries.
b. By 2010, this agreement had been signed by 175 countries and ratified by 172 countries.
c. The United States, Afghanistan, and Haiti have signed but have not ratified the convention.
3. Hazardous waste smugglers evade the laws by using an array of tactics.
4. In 2000, delegates from 122 countries completed a global treaty called the Stockholm Convention
on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) to control 12 persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
a. POPs are widely used toxic chemicals that can accumulate in the fatty tissues of humans and
other organisms at high trophic levels in food webs.
b. The original list of 12 chemicals, called the dirty dozen, includes DDT and eight other
chlorine-containing persistent pesticides, PCBs, dioxins, and furans.
c. By 2009, 169 countries had signed a strengthened version of the POPs treaty that seeks to ban
or phase out the use of these chemicals and to detoxify or isolate stockpiles of them.
d. It does allow 25 countries to continue using DDT to combat malaria until safer alternatives
are available.
e. The United States has not yet ratified this treaty.
5. In 2000, the Swedish Parliament enacted a law that, by 2020, will ban all chemicals that are
persistent in the environment and that can accumulate in living tissue.
a. Industries required to perform risk assessments on the chemicals they use and to show that
these chemicals are safe to use, as opposed to requiring the government to show that they are
dangerous.
b. Strong opposition to this approach in the United States.
D. We can make the transition to low-waste societies.
1. Many environmental scientists argue that we can make a transition to a low-waste society by
understanding and following key principles:
a. Everything is connected.
b. There is no away, as in to throw away, for the wastes we produce.
c. Polluters and producers should pay for the wastes they produce.
d. Different categories of hazardous waste and recyclable waste should not be mixed.
2. Case Study Industrial Ecosystems: Copying Nature
a. Make industrial manufacturing processes cleaner and more sustainable by redesigning them to
mimic how nature deals with wastes, with the waste outputs of one organism become the
nutrient inputs of another organism.
b. Reuse or recycle most of the minerals and chemicals used, instead of burying or burning them
or shipping them somewhere.
c. Interact with each other through resource exchange webs in which the wastes of one
manufacturer become the raw materials for another.
d. In Kalundborg, Denmark, an electric power plant and nearby industries, farms, and homes are
collaborating to save money and to reduce their outputs of waste and pollution within what is
called an ecoindustrial park, or industrial ecosystem.
e. Such biomimicry encourages companies to come up with new, environmentally beneficial,
and less resource-intensive chemicals, processes, and products that they can sell worldwide.
E. The three big ideas for this chapter:
1. The order of priorities for dealing with solid waste should be to produce less of it, reuse, and
recycle as much of it as possible and safely burn or bury what is left.
2. The order of priority for dealing with hazardous waste should be to produce less of it, reuse or
recycle it, convert it to less-hazardous material, and safely store what is left.
3. We need to view solid wastes as wasted resources and hazardous wastes as materials that we
should not be producing in the first place.
Key Terms
closed-loop (primary)
recycling (p. 417)
environmental justice (p. 428)
hazardous (toxic)
waste (p. 413)
industrial solid waste (p. 413)
integrated waste management
(p. 414)
municipal solid waste (p. 413) secondary recycling (p. 417)
open dumps (p. 422) solid waste (p. 412)
primary (closed-loop) toxic (hazardous)
recycling (p. 417) waste (p. 413)
recycle (p. 415) waste management (p. 414)
reduce (p. 415) waste reduction (p. 414)
reuse (p. 415)
sanitary landfills (p. 421)

News Videos
Who pays the price for technology?, The Brooks/Cole Environmental Science Video Library 2009, ©2011,
DVD ISBN-13: 978-0-538-73355-7

Jean Suppliers Pollution, The Brooks/Cole Environmental Science Video Library 2009, ©2011, DVD
ISBN-13: 978-0-538-73355-7

China’s Deadly Pollution, The Brooks/Cole Environmental Science Video Library 2009, ©2011, DVD
ISBN-13: 978-0-538-73355-7

Sacrificing the Environment for Energy?, The Brooks/Cole Environmental Science Video Library 2010
with Workbook, ©2012, DVD ISBN-13: 978-0-538-73495-0

Additional Video Resources

A Civil Action (movie, 1999)
The families of children who died sue two companies for dumping toxic waste.

Erin Brockovich
True story of a single mother who becomes a legal assistant and almost single-handedly brings down a
California power company accused of polluting a city's water supply.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0195685/

American Experience: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (PBS Documentary Series)

This episode looks at the biologist who first brought the devastating effects of DDT to the public attention.
http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=2792206

Waste (1985)
Surprising introduction to the many facets of our waste problem.
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/waste.html

Toxic Wastes (Documentary, 2004)

Part 1: A History of Toxic Wastes in the Biosphere; Part 2: Toxic Waste Today.
http://www.hawkhill.com/index.php?content=product&product=23

Crapshoot: The Gamble with Our Wastes (Documentary, 2004)

A look at the failure of our current sewage system, and present alternatives
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/craps.html
Up Close and Toxic (Documentary, 2004)
What are the hazards in our own homes?
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/up.html

Web Resources
Earth 911
A valuable resource for recycling and sustainability.
http://earth911.org/

Recycle City
An interactive site from the EPA about the cycle of waste management.
http://www.epa.gov/recyclecity/

Ecycling
A valuable resource from the EPA on recycling ewaste.
http://www.epa.gov/waste/conserve/materials/ecycling/index.htm

Erin Brockovich
Information about grassroots environmental advocacy and how one person can make a difference.
http://www.brockovich.com/index.html

The Freecycle Network

Information about freecycling and nationwidelisting of freecycle groups.
http://www.freecycle.org/

Urban Mining
Information about e-waste and urban mining. Free app called My Recycle List.
http://urbanmining.org/

Urban Ore
Company in Berkeley, California that accepts and sells materials that would otherwise become trash.
http://urbanore.com/

Habitat for Humanity ReStore

Habitat for Humanity program for repurposing building materials.
http://www.habitat.org/cd/env/restore.aspx

Digital Integration

Correlation to Global Environment Watch

Consumption Human Health

E-Waste Industrial Ecology
Environmental Justice Precautionary Principle
European Union Recycling
Global Environmental Ethics Watch: Environmental Justice Solid Waste
Globalization Superfund
Green Chemistry U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency

Correlation to Explore More

Environment and Human Health Hazardous and Toxic Chemicals

Environmental History Solid Wastes