INFORM - Community Waste Prevention Toolkit

Community Waste Prevention Toolkit

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Overview: What Is Waste Prevention? What Are Its Benefits?

A clever person can solve a problem, but a wise person avoids one. When addressing one of the most common environmental problems facing governments today -- how to manage and dispose of a community's solid waste -- it makes sense to try first to eliminate the problem at the source. This is the premise of waste prevention, the most cost-effective, environmentally sound, and socially responsible way to deal with a community's solid waste. This fact sheet provides the answers to three key questions:

What is waste prevention?
What are the advantages of waste prevention over recycling?
How can waste prevention be achieved?

What Is Waste Prevention?

Waste prevention (also known as source reduction) is a reduction in the amount and/or toxicity of materials entering the waste stream prior to recycling or disposal. By preventing waste before it is created, waste prevention provides an alternative to managing waste. In addition, it gets at the root of our society's over-consumption and squandering of resources. Instead of spending time, effort, and money on the short-term problem of what to do with our garbage, more and more communities are trying to find long-term solutions by answering questions such as the following:

Why is there so much garbage in the first place?
Are there ways of living and doing business that result in the generation of less waste?
Can products be made, delivered, and used in a more resource-efficient manner?

In practice, waste prevention means paying attention to what we use to make products, what products we buy, how we use them, and what we do with them when we no longer need them. Its ultimate goal is to protect the environment by achieving a more efficient and cost-effective use of natural resources. Waste prevention can be accomplished in a variety of ways, all of them aimed at using less material and generating less waste. It can mean:

Using durable, repairable, reusable, and less toxic products.
Designing products and packaging to use less material.
Doing a job (or providing a service) in a way that reduces or eliminates the need for a product.

In addition to its environmental benefits, waste prevention almost always leads to lower procurement and operational costs, as well as to savings in waste management and disposal. It can also benefit a community's economy by promoting job growth and development in the materials reuse sector (i.e., businesses involved in the repair, reuse, and remanufacture of used products).

What Are the Advantages of Waste Prevention Over Recycling?

While waste prevention reduces garbage at the source, recycling diverts materials that have already been discarded and uses them in place of virgin feedstocks. Recycling is a vital strategy for reducing wastes and using resources more efficiently, but it still involves costly, time-consuming, and energy-intensive collection, handling, and reprocessing of materials. In most communities with mandatory recycling laws, workers and trucks are needed to:

Collect the recyclables at the curb.
Transfer them to another location for processing or separation.
Deliver them to a vendor (recycler).

With waste prevention, on the other hand, the materials never make it to the curb, so there are fewer costs associated with labor, energy, and equipment use; less traffic and noise; avoided air pollution and associated health risks; and fewer processing and disposal fees. To a far greater degree than recycling, waste prevention reduces:

The need for raw materials.
The energy consumption and environmental damage associated with extracting minerals and harvesting timber.
The need to manufacture and distribute finished materials -- two highly energy- and materials-intensive activities.

Because of its many benefits, waste prevention is the preferred strategy in the solid waste management hierarchy endorsed by the US Environmental Protection Agency, followed by reuse and recycling.

How Can Waste Prevention Be Achieved?

Individuals, businesses, schools, hospitals, and government offices can practice waste prevention by:

Buying waste-preventing products, such as copiers that can print double-sided, and remanufactured products.
Buying products that come with less packaging. Containers and packaging make up one-third of municipal waste in the US, by weight, and one-half by volume.
Buying products that are durable and/or reusable.
Buying nontoxic products, or products with reduced toxic content.
Reusing, repairing, or donating usable goods instead of throwing them away.
Sending products that are no longer needed back to vendors or manufacturers for reuse or recycling.

Additional Information

For more information on waste prevention, see the National Waste Prevention Coalition web site at http://dnr.metrokc.gov/swd/nwpc/index.htmand the National Recycling Coalition's Waste Prevention Forum at http://www.nrc-recycle.org/councils/SRF/sourcereduction.htm

For waste-prevention practices, procurement strategies, and case studies, see John P. Winter and Anne Marie Alonso, Waste at Work: Prevention Strategies for the Bottom Line, INFORM, Inc., 1999.

In addition, the Purchasing for Waste Prevention section of this toolkit provides an overview of waste prevention practices and purchasing strategies that can be used to increase efficiency and improve environmental performance. Also see the fact sheets on minimizing waste and pollution from:

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