Recently I met Farouk Banna of the World Bank, and we discussed the bank’s investments in the global waste business. What always strikes me is how the waste industry is all about collection and landfills. In fact, out of the $220 billion per year spent today, and even more importantly, the $375 billion anticipated annual expenditure by 2025, most is or will be used to pay for collection, with a much smaller amount utilized for disposal and basically little to none for recycling — and absolutely nothing to develop value-added technologies for the materials involved.
Since most everyone seems forgets about the added value of all of these materials, I asked my good friend Linda Bonvie to help me with a graphic. Basically I took the World Bank report of waste and waste streams and circled every product, which I assigned “another life” with existing known technologies. She helped me develop two graphics, which from now on will be my total presentation whenever I’m asked to give a talk on waste. I plan to call it “Welcome to Another Life in a Zero Waste World”
For more on this subject, you can visit www.zerowasteglobal.com
Click on for a larger image.
Click on for a larger image.
