The climate-solid waste link -- and how companies address it. By Joel Makower
In most companies, the conversation about climate change has had less to do with waste than with watts -- the link between energy use and the production of greenhouse gases associated with global warming. But there’s another link that’s increasingly being drawn by climate experts: the global warming impacts of solid waste.
What’s the connection? The now-classic “three Rs” of waste management -- reduce, reuse, and recycle -- do more than “save” landfills. They also help to reduce the energy intensity of our “stuff” -- the countless tons of industrial and household materials that make up the bulk of our societies’ waste streams. More efficiently using resources through waste prevention and recycling reduces the energy required to produce and dispose of these goods. And that, in turn, helps to slow climate change.
This may seem like common sense, but the waste-warming link hasn’t yet been prominent in most companies’ climate strategies, which tend to focus more on reducing energy use and increasing efficiency and the use of energy from renewable sources.
But the link has received increased attention lately, notably from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has been integrating climate change into its solid-waste programs. Last month, at the agency’s WasteWise’s annual awards ceremony, for example, EPA telegraphed its growing interest in this topic by issuing two waste-related climate awards for the first time. The winners:
- Virco Mfg. Corp. (Torrance, Calif.), a supplier of furniture for offices, hotels, and other institutions, as well as the largest U.S. manufacturer of educational furniture. In addition to using a high content of recycled material in its products, Virco has engaged in a comprehensive recycling program -- not just of raw materials, but also of such commodities as oil and water.
- Constellation Energy Group (Baltimore, Md.) an energy generator and utility, has initiated a variety of awareness campaigns to educate employees about the relationships between climate change and waste prevention and recycling, and has launched additional efforts to educate employees about greenhouse gas emission reduction strategies. Virco and Constellation represent two of a small but growing number of companies that have leveraged their waste reduction strategies as a means of reducing their climate footprints. Other examples include:
- Allergan (Irvine, Calif.), a specialty pharmaceutical manufacturer, which performs a full assessment of potential waste during new product development, evaluating the potential environmental impact at each step in a product’s life-cycle. A series of product development protocols focusing on waste enabled the company to reduce packaging material by 75 tons during 2001, the equivalent of 53 metric tons of carbon (MTCE). Redesigning packaging involved with bottle tips and caps reduced an additional 28 MTCE. Collecting recyclables added 1,600 MTCE to the total. Meanwhile, reducing disposal costs and generating revenue from recycling contributed $364,000 to the bottom line.
- Seydel Companies (Atlanta, Ga.), a manufacturer of textile process chemicals, has implemented a variety of waste-reduction initiatives, such as using scrap plastics as building blocks for more advanced polymer systems. For example, it created a new product by combining modified PET plastic from food and beverage containers with reclaimed vegetable oil from fast-food restaurants, yielding an effective water and oil repellant for textiles. Last year, Seydel recycled 813 tons of HDPE plastic, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 312 MTCE.
At first blush, the efforts of Allergan, Seydel, and the others may not seem much different from countless other corporate waste-reduction initiatives, except that greenhouse gas metrics have been added to the companies’ existing waste- and cost-savings calculations. That’s pretty much the case. It is unlikely that any of these companies engaged in these efforts solely because of the climate-related benefits.
But that’s also the point. What EPA and others are hoping to communicate is that as pressures grow for companies to measure, report, and reduce their climate footprints, solid waste represents an often overlooked source of opportunities for improvement.
Warming to Better Data
To help companies better exploit these opportunities, EPA has created a Waste Reduction Model calculator, dubbed WARM, which is available as both an
Excel spreadsheet as well as an
online calculator. Both versions of WARM ask users to enter information about baseline and alternative waste-management practices, then calculate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with different strategies, “allowing users to quantify past achievements and plan for the future,” as EPA puts it.
For of material -- WARM covers 21 common types of waste materials -- users input the quantity generated and how it currently is treated -- by landfilling, incinerating, recycling, or composting. For example, using the example in the box below, WARM calculated that recycling 115 tons of corrugated cardboard would prevent 81 MTCE. In contrast, landfilling would release about 9 MTCE. The net difference of 90 MTCE is equal to keeping about 68 cars off the road for a year.
Materials themselves aren’t the only consideration. WARM also asks users to calculate transportation distances when assessing disposal options. For example, it may turn out that recycling is not worth the energy and climate savings if the recycling facility is 100 miles away, compared to sending the same waste to a landfill only 10 miles away.
Complex Calculations
Making such calculations can be an eye-opener, pointing up the complexities of environmental decision-making. For example, while preventing waste is the most climate-friendly solution for most materials, that’s not always the case. According to WARM, recycling 1 ton of aluminum cans reduces 4.11 MTCE, while preventing 1 ton of aluminum waste reduces only 2.49 MTCE.
Similarly, recycling a ton of cardboard reduces more MTCE than preventing a ton of cardboard waste. (The methodology behind such calculations can be found in the PDF document
Solid Waste Management and Greenhouse Gases: A Life-Cycle Assessment of Emissions and Sinks.
The calculations may be complex, but the story they tell is not: the solution to climate change is not just in the air, but grounded in your dumpster, and in the daily purchasing and operational decisions you make.
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This article first appeared in the November 2002 edition of the Green Business Letter
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