Moving from recycling to waste prevention: A review of barriers and enables

Abstract

Current European waste policy does not mainly aim to treat waste streams but rather place in the foreground of interest the complete supply chain of a product. Waste prevention and re-use do have the highest priority and they take effect before the end-of-life phase of a product or a material is reached. Recycling only takes the third place whereas recovery and disposal represent the least favourable options. Recycling can help to decrease the consumption of primary resources but it does not tackle the causes but only the symptoms. In principle, recycling processes require energy and will generate side streams (i.e. waste). Furthermore, there are insuperable barriers and the practice is far from 100% recycling. The philosophy of waste prevention and re-use is completely different since they really tackle the causes. It is self-evident that a decrease of waste will also decrease the consumption of resources, energy and money to process the waste. However, even if European legislation is proceeding in the right direction, a clear decrease in waste generation did not occur up to now. Unfortunately, waste generation represents a positive factor of economic growth. Basically, waste generation is a huge business and numerous stakeholders are not interested to reduce waste. More sophisticated incentives are required to decouple economic growth from waste generation.

Measuring the recyclability of e-waste: an innovative method and its implications

“…The term 'recycling potential' has been defined from an economic perspective, satisfying the requirement that potential ewaste recycling revenues exceed the costs of collection, transportation, and processing (Bartl, 2014;Dahmus and Gutowski, 2007;Graedel, 2011b). Owing to economic fluctuation and rapid technological innovation, however, recycling potential does not take into account the entire processing cost and thus cannot always reflect the nature of the recycling technology.…”

Recycling of Rolling Stocks

“…In addition, there is no current recycling technology economically efficient enough to recover composite materials, such as carbon fibers (Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer) or glass fiber reinforced polymer, as new technological solutions [1]. As such, the residual waste of composite materials remains considerable in practice [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].…”

Exploring the Phenomenon of Zero Waste and Future Cities

“…Given the innate challenge, complexity, and formative inconsistencies of this sphere [2,6], alongside recognition of the role that "contested and negotiated narrative" plays in policy formation [3], to what extent are critiques, such as that zero waste is populist, over-simplified, reactionary, and/or too extreme [145][146][147][148] justified? Interestingly, there is now nothing too unique or special about the ideal of zero waste.…”