Reducing, Reusing And Recycling Waste

Reducing Waste

1. Reducing the use of harmful articles which are non biodegradable like polybags and replacing them by cloth bags or paper bags.

2. Promoting awareness among the human towards a judicious use of products to reduce proportional generation of waste, may help in saving our environment.

3. With improved technology which aims at use of minimum resources, product durability has improved. Hence purchasing items which will not effect the environment eg., solar heater and other solar products will help in reducing waste generated at source.

4. Learning to use products which do not generate too much waste, are ecofriendly and biodegradable.

5. Household waste i.e., vegetable peels, garden waste, etc. can be reduced by making compost.

6. Many household items are thrown or discarded given a slide fault and new items are purchased. A consumer can rather make a wise choice and reuse the items after reparing or polishing them or giving them a makeover instead of purchasing a substitute.

7. At the time of using disposables like plastic plates, utensils and plastic food storage bags they should not be thrown away as most of them can last for a long time and can be put too many uses.

8. Using washable table napkins instead of paper napkins could be another possibility.

Reuse of Waste

There are many things, that can be reused with a little change in appearance like:

1. Converting old pieces of cloth into dolls, cushion covers, doormats, etc.

2. Making new notebook from unused pages of old notebooks.

3. Reusing old tyres, tin can, glass bottles, etc.

4. Many waste collectors collect waste items which serve as raw material for another item by using their art skills eg., handicrafts.

5. Some solid wastes from the industry can be utilized directly eg., flyash from power plant is used as cement substitute.

6. Flyash is also used in making of roads and filling up low lying areas.

7. Bricks are also made from flyash.

Recycling Waste

Nowadays the emphasis is to utilize the waste and make the best of it by recycling it.

1. Recycling is processing the waste into raw material usable in other useful materials. This both ways - reduces the waste generation by reusing or recycling it.

2. The waste material that can be recycled may come from several sources i.e. domestic waste, office waste, plastic, paper scrap material, metals and textiles.

3.Recycling is possible only if the waste is of segregated at source and then soiled, cleaned and reprocessed into new useful products.

4. Recycling is beneficial only if the cost reprocessing is covered by the demand of the product, eg. baggasse (residue of sugarcane after extraction of juice) is used for manufacturing paper.

With increasing problems associated with disposal of waste, 3Rs (reduce, reuse and recycle) strategy can solve the problem. These three are the best way to make a positive impact on our environment. It’s important to put these into practice, as landfill space is quickly running out, the plastic pollution in our oceans are increasing, and our environment is deteriorating at a faster pace.