{"id":154,"date":"2018-06-19T22:10:17","date_gmt":"2018-06-19T22:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/?p=154"},"modified":"2026-10-11T03:16:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T03:16:31","slug":"waste-reduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/2018\/06\/19\/waste-reduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Waste Reduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the concept of preventing waste at its source. It sounds simple and like common sense, but in practice, it is not that straightforward. Our lifestyles, especially in modern times, encourage us to consume more and more ready-made products, many of which are designed to be discarded after a single use. A single visit to a workplace coffee shop, for example, can result in paper towels, food wrappers, and a plastic cup or bottle ending up in the bin. Moreover, businesses are driven by the pursuit of profit and often encourage consumers to buy repeatedly. As a result, many businesses pay little or no attention to the environmental damage caused by their products and business practices.<\/p>\n

Waste prevention is a brilliant practice for us to engage with, but some people have some doubts about how to measure its efficiency.<\/p>\n

To start with, there have never been any reliable figures for waste that was prevented, because it is easy to quantify waste that we have all made, but never easy to quantify waste that was not made or that was prevented.<\/p>\n

Recently, as many people have come to appreciate the need to do something about waste, there have been increased efforts to embark on source reduction schemes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Source reduction is simply a range of activities that individuals, communities, and manufacturing establishments engage in to reduce the amount of toxic substances or waste that they generate. Examples may include:
\n1. Manufacturers can reduce the amount of packaging and wrapping materials they use on products
\n2. Produce materials that last longer, rather than cheap stuff that breaks after a short period
\n3. Manage organic waste such as food scraps and yard trimmings in a way that can keep them out of the trash bin.<\/p>\n

Pallet Repair, Inc. Pallet Repair, Inc., of Baltimore, Maryland, remanufactures between 8,000 and 10,000 pallets per week for reuse. The company provides services to repair old pallets, manufacture pallets from used pallets, and take apart unusable pallets to grind up for reuse as mulch. At a minimum, Pallet Repair restores approximately 416,000 pallets annually, saving 5.4 million board feet of wood and conserving nearly 60,000 cubic yards of landfill space.<\/p>\n

In other examples, Coca-Cola has reduced the weight of its cans by 41% since 1963 by reducing its aluminium usage and also shaving off some part of the cans. This may not sound like a big deal, given the size of the company, but if every manufacturer can reduce its packaging by 40%, we would be miles better off than where we are now.<\/p>\n

In 1991, ShopRite in the USA encouraged its customers to reuse paper and plastic shopping bags. By the fourth year, about 53 million grocery paper bags were being reused, translating into about 3,430 paper-bag waste items rescued from their way to landfills and combustion facilities.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the concept of preventing waste at its source. It sounds simple and like common sense, but in practice,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[95,98,97,99,103,94,102,96,100,101,91,92,93,104],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-waste","tag-composting","tag-food-waste","tag-municipal-solid-waste-usa","tag-organic-waste","tag-plastic-waste-paper-waste","tag-recycling","tag-source-reduction","tag-trash","tag-types-of-waste","tag-waste-prevention","tag-waste-management","tag-waste-recovery","tag-waste-to-energy","tag-yard-waste"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":426,"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions\/426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enviropol.com\/green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}