Beyond Recycling: Making Waste Obsolete

Given our rapid depletion of resources, especially raw materials, and Australia’s ever-increasing waste creation, it’s time to ask: what are the best ways to encourage resource recovery and recycling to get to “zero waste”?

South Australia’s money-back container recycling scheme is a success story, with bottle-recycling rates the highest in the country. But the question is whether we achieve zero waste through recycling alone.

Our research says: no. The focus needs to be on avoiding waste creation in the first place. We have to re-think the way we design and construct products and buildings to make it easier to re-use or disassemble them at the end of their life.

A good example of transformation in the construction sector is the take up of prefabrication, with machining off site. This allows for almost zero-waste production of building components, easy retrieval of materials and components, and building elements that are easy to re-use when the building is being demolished.

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Source: The Conversation
By Steffen Lehmann and Atiq Zaman