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Mission-oriented innovation in urban governance
Published in Antje Klitkou, Arne Martin Fevolden, Marco Capasso, From Waste to Value, 2019
Markus M. Bugge, Arne Martin Fevolden
Reuse and prevention compose the top two levels of the waste hierarchy and are the most sustainable options. Reuse implies that organic resources are used again without breaking them down and reprocessing them (which is the case in a recycling process). A typical example of reuse is using leftover food as feed for animals. Prevention is the most sustainable option and forms the top of the waste pyramid. Typical examples of waste prevention are serving food on smaller plates at hotels or repacking of food items into sizes that fit the needs of the consumers and which do not generate leftovers. Reuse and waste prevention have emerged as the most important alternatives to pursue today in order to create more sustainable production and consumption patterns (Mourad, 2016).
Waste and Pollution
Published in John C. Ayers, Sustainability, 2017
The waste hierarchy is the order of effectiveness of waste and pollution reduction strategies, which from highest to lowest are prevent, reduce, reuse, recycle, energy recovery, and disposal. The most effective and economical approach, pollution prevention (P2), seeks to increase the efficiency of processes such as industrial production and consumer consumption to reduce pollution (see http://www.epa.gov/p2/). It includes the use of green chemistry to prevent pollution by substituting nonhazardous for hazardous chemicals in industrial processes. Cradle-to-cradle design is used to create resource efficient products with minimal waste production over the entire life cycle (McDonough and Braungart 2002). Pollution prevention can also use methods from industrial ecology, which studies material and energy flows in industrial systems and finds holistic methods for increasing material and energy use efficiency.
Background of Waste Management System
Published in Atiq Zaman, Tahmina Ahsan, Zero-Waste, 2019
The ‘waste hierarchy’ is the classification of waste management options in hierarchical order to choose the most favourable waste management policy actions (avoid, reduce, reuse, and recycle) from the least favourable options (treatment and landfill). It aims to reduce environmental impacts by prioritizing prevention, reuse, recycling, and recovery over landfill (Hultman & Corvellec, 2012). In the US, pollution prevention became a priority in the ’70s, and waste management cost, liability, and public opposition to landfills are the reasons for waste reduction and popularizing the hierarchy in the ’80s (National Research Council, 1985; Overcash, 2002). Figure 1.1 shows the various waste management options in a hierarchical order.
Food waste management for the UK grocery retail sector—a supply chain collaboration perspective
Published in Production Planning & Control, 2023
Ying Yang, Hattie Barnes, Biao Yang, George Onofrei, Hung Nguyen
Prevention within the waste hierarchy is the top priority level and the most favourable option (Papargyropoulou et al. 2014). The common practice for the grocery retail sector is in store price discounts, which is a traditional preventative measure to extract sales from close to end-of-life products (British Retail Consortium 2015; Filimonau and Gherbin 2017). Additionally, secondary market channels, e.g. staff canteens and shops, were also developed to push end-of-life stock down. Effective stock management, rotation of stock, and clear placement of reduced items were also studied in the literature (Kulikovskaja and Aschemann-Witzel 2017). However, the extra resources needed for stores to identify these types of items, attach a new price-tag to them, and remove them from shelves and transport them to sell at reduced prices might be too high.
Economic potential and environmental impacts of reused steel structures
Published in Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, 2020
Sirje Vares, Petr Hradil, Michael Sansom, Viorel Ungureanu
The ‘waste hierarchy’ sets the preference for waste management (European Commission, 2008), where the best option is waste prevention, followed by waste preparation for reuse, recycling, recovery and, the least favourable option, disposal. According to the European Waste Framework Directive, member states should take measures to achieve the best possible management of waste streams. The Directive suggests taking economic, technical feasibility, environmental and health benefits into account in this determination. For identifying which would be the best waste management scenario, the authors suggest using whole life cycle assessment (CEN, 2006) and economic assessment (CEN, 2015; ISO, 2017) methods.
On a voyage of recovery: a review of the UK’s resource recovery from waste infrastructure
Published in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 2019
The waste hierarchy prioritises prevention and minimisation of waste through e.g. design for durability, light weighting and reduced consumption. Nonetheless, significant amounts of waste continue to be generated globally that require management (United Nations Environment Program [UNEP], 2015).