[B2B long-form promotional material for green energy consulting firm]
“Our specialists work with your current infrastructure, assess best practices for your interests and budget, and facilitate communication to ensure a smooth transition to more sustainable—but still affordable—waste management. This integrated approach implements new technologies, policies, processes, even philosophies to help your company become greener, sooner, but with no negative impact on your bottom line.”
We’ve all heard it: Global warming likely poses the greatest current threat to our survival as a species. And yet, despite climatologists’ frantic pleas for action, governments continue to fumble, fudge, and ignore the crisis. What’s equally terrifying? Climate change is not the only environmental menace bearing down on humankind.
As landfills continue to devour swaths of land across a heavily populated globe, we face certain certainties: our planet provides limited landmass with limited resources to deposit under its soil. Average North American citizens, even those who identify as “conscientious”— recycling when they can, forgoing plastic straws, composting organic waste—dedicate little thought to where their “garbage garbage” goes after it leaves their sight; it’s considered disposed of. Sustainable waste management specialists, however, are listening to environmentalists’ warnings and heeding the writing on the wall: these attitudes must change, and fast. The traditional linear production trajectory of “make, use, and dispose” assumes unlimited resources and unlimited means of disposal, ignoring the realities that govern life on earth. Future-proof waste management (rather than disposal) must perform an increasingly productive role within “circular economies,” which reduce waste to zero and treat all materials as resources to preserve rather than garbage to bury.
In such a circular economy, material loops, which manage and reabsorb byproducts and waste into a broader system, not only function more efficiently and fruitfully than segments of a traditional linear economy, but also react better: they tighten and reshape themselves as they adjust to local and regional circumstances. Necessarily, then, precisely what these waste management practices look like will vary by location and context. For example, a region’s natural resources, a population’s penchant for consuming a particular non-recyclable material, or a locale’s available technologies should determine which waste-based energy production method(s) best suit that area. For example, if a community lacks the technological capacity to utilize methane as an energy source, a landfill that converts waste energy to methane gas may not be the ideal waste management solution.
While finding local “fixes” might sound simple enough, what complicates matters is the broad reach of this approach to waste management. To shift toward a circular economy, waste management must recruit the cooperation of many vast systems and institutions, particularly those that dictate the behaviors of producers and consumers—the two main sources of non-biodegradable waste. Current practice and research already proves the societal and environmental benefits of green manufacturing, sustainable building design and construction, and decreased reliance on nonrenewable raw materials. A more challenging maneuver will be shifting the public’s mindset away from what Jonathan Chapman calls a “waste-making culture,” which pursues cheap production at the expense of responsible policy.
So how should we steer modern society toward a zero-waste culture in which integrated governmental policy, manufacturing practices, and after-use management buoy a general zeitgeist of deeper global, local, and personal responsibility? The short answer: in baby steps. And the approach must be two-fold: economic and ethical. In other words, while promoting the values of collective well-being and personal responsibility, preservationists must convincingly demonstrate that circular economies can be financially stable, even profitable, and that moving toward zero-waste doesn’t have to destabilize the economy.
Tightening material loops and eliminating unusable waste will require not only a cultural sea change, but also cooperation among all levels of government and society, which seems to present yet another daunting component of this project. However, these complex, coordinated systemic and institutional shifts can and do happen incrementally. Landfills, for example, are complicated and potentially flexible machines by their own right—a far cry from pre-1972 ocean dumping, or from nineteenth-century garbage pits. Their engineers and managers must consider refuse sorting and treatment, microbial communities, waste water, gas production, contamination, and leakage; merely to establish a landfill in the United States can require a decade of planning and petitioning. These expensive, complicated landfills can’t magically vanish; they can, though, be converted into something more productive—a hub along the circular trajectory of the material economy rather than the end point of linear production. An existing landfill can be converted into a municipal compost, a methane production plant, or an energy-producing incineration site. That is to say, even our current disposal systems can be integrated (or, as green consumption advocates might say, “up-cycled”) within a circular economy of conscientious production, management, and reuse.
Individual companies—especially small businesses—are the perfect trailblazers who can raise the bar, set the example, and shift the waste disposal conversation, proving how zero-waste practices can be not only possible, but even profitable. Our goal at <<company name removed>> is to help companies and municipalities take small, incremental steps toward a less wasteful future that benefits everyone. Our specialists work with your current infrastructure, assess best practices for your interests and budget, and facilitate communication with government agencies, utility providers, and even your competitors to ensure a smooth transition to more sustainable—but still affordable—waste management. This integrated approach implements new technologies, policies, processes, even philosophies to help your company become greener, sooner, but with no negative impact on your bottom line.
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E. Sterzinger -- Writer, Editor, Educator 