Waste Prevention for Environmental-Friendly Living

For decades, advocates of green living have focused on disposing the daily waste in the least hazardous ways. Waste disposal has been an issue worth millions of dollars each year in a single developed country alone. Only more recently have the eco-conscious people started to underscore the prevention of waste as the more environmental-friendly strategy rather than spending millions on getting rid of it safely. This led to the global movement of Zero Waste – a holistic approach combining various environmental-friendly phases for product development.

The primary aim of Zero Waste is to prevent as much of the harmful waste as possible by modeling various processes of product development on natural processes. The main considerations in this case are: product designing, redesigning, and packaging; publicity/advertisement; distribution and usage of the products; and environmental-friendly disassembling of products. There is obviously a strong academic aspect to the strategy of making these processes feasible since a careful assessment of the products’ designing on the environment has to be made by experts in environmental sciences and waste management. This approach has recently come to be known as cradle-to-cradle production.

Product designing is certainly not the sole focus of the Zero Waste approach. Instead, the movement extends to include more responsible corporate performance and sustainable economic policies. The shift in emphasis for change, in this view, places greater responsibility on manufacturers or producers to make environmental-friendly products that leave no or minimal hazardous wastes for the consumers to tackle. Improving the infrastructure, so as to save the money spent on landfills and incinerators etc, can play a notable role in sustainable green living. Another policy on the Zero Waste list of commendations is ending taxpayer subsidies for the manufactures of non-healthy products, including those that are hard to dispose or produce a lot of waste. Same holds for facilities that pollute the air through harmful emanations.

The Zero Waste approach takes the environmental–friendly angle at sustainable living within an ecological community as responsible humans. At its core, the movement follows from the ages old adage of prevention being better than cure. In a green community, one of its translations becomes ‘save your resources by not creating waste.’

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