SkipsForYou are very familiar with some of the legislation and regulation behind waste-management and skip hire. We thought it might be useful to discuss some of the more common waste management terms, although these can vary world-wide and may have different ethical, political and social implications from country to country.
Here, SkipsForYou talks briefly about the Waste Hierarchy, Polluter Pays Principle and Extended Producer Responsiblity.
Waste hierarchy - The waste hierarchy refers to the "3 Rs," otherwise known (especially to Bob The Builder afficionados) as 'Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.'
This classifies waste management strategies in a hierarchy of desirability. It's best to reduce rubbish, after that, it's desirable to re-use items that might otherwise be thrown away, and following those two, then recycling also helps, in terms of processing waste in some way so it's either regenerated, or gets converted to some other item which is useful. For example by taking bottles to the bottle bank, they will then be melted down and re-used as glass, whereas recycled plastic packaging does not tend to be made into more of the same sort of plastic packaging.
According to www.britglass.co.uk, glass can be recycled over and over without any reduction in quality or appearance, and since the UK has more than 50,000 bottle banks, this is being done quite sucessfully.
The waste hierarchy is the foundation of most waste minimization strategies, focussing on extracting the most benefits from products, and creating the minimum amount of waste.
The Polluter Pays Principle aims to make people focus on the amount of waste they are creating, by making them pay for appropriate disposal of the waste. There are obviously pros and cons with this approach, such as the fact that while our economy might be dependent on small businesses being able to operate, this sort of a system is going to be far more punitive for small companies than for large industries who can easily afford waste levies, and in fact even afford fines for incorrect waste disposal.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)is a system where producers take responsibility for their products throughout the life cycle, including end-of-life disposal costs. This means that firms which manufacture, import and/or sell products are required to be responsible for the products after their useful life as well as during manufacture. This is taking away the costs associated with disposal from governments and tax-payers, upstream to the manufacturers.