Why Recycling As A Waste Management Method Is Important

Efficient waste management should be a concern for everyone. To live is an incessant act of consumption, and waste is the ultimate end of consumption. Hence, waste is inevitable in our lives, as long as we live, we produce, we build, we consume.

The question is not a matter of if we should produce waste, no matter how we try, waste production is inevitable. Rather, the question should be ‘How we can effectively reduce and manage waste?’

In the product – waste chain, applying efficient waste management will effectively reduce the environmental and resource implication that comes as a result of our need to consume.

Inefficient waste management methods can consequently lead to environmental issues, health, and social justice problems. 

So, waste management is not just an environmental issue, it touches the health aspect of our lives and the social justice within our social setting.

Due to this lingering waste management issue, it is right to elucidate on the importance of waste management and why not only must we all be concerned, we must all actively participate in the process.

Here are the reasons why efficient waste management is our collective concern:

• Resource Conservation: It is a simple maths that the more you take from available resources, the less of it you have. Over time, a limited amount of resources will ultimately run out and that comes with its own consequences. As consumers, productions come with an act of resource harvest, and this means that with each consumption, environmentally and resource-wise, we are getting lower.

This poses a dire threat to our environmental integrity and resource availability. Through the efficient waste management methods of recycling, we can reuse already harvested resources many times over while significantly stalling resource depletion and environmental degradation.

Efficient waste management comes with the promise of saving our environment and available resources for future generations.

• Save Space: One implication of waste management methods such as landfills and incineration grounds is that they require an enormous precious amount of space to operate.

A society that cares about environmental integrity cannot afford the landed space ascribed only to heaping waste or serving as incineration sites for it. By recycling most of our wastes, we preserve space that would have otherwise been used just for waste management.

Recycling eliminates the necessity of landfills and incineration grounds and processes waste back into valuable usable resources for consumption.

• Reduces Energy Consumption: One difference between recycling materials and raw materials is that waste going through the recycling process has once or many times before gone through the processing phase hence to recycle materials consumes significantly less energy than it requires to process raw materials for consumption.

When one considers processes such as resource extractions, refining, and transportation of raw materials for consumption, the energy requirement for raw procession becomes significantly worrying. By relying mostly on recycling already processed and used resources, we not only decrease our reliance on extracting further raw materials from our environment, but we also reduce the energy required to make it feasible.

• Improved Health: Health is one major factor that drove the necessity of efficient waste management, Landfills, water spills, and even incineration grounds are cesspools for vector and pathogens. 

Incinerations also contribute to carbon emissions into our atmosphere which is significant to global warming and consequently detrimental to general human wellbeing.

By employing the recycling method in our waste management process, we eliminate the need to keep a large amount of waste at a given location for a long time, effectively cutting down on vector and pathogen breeding caused by this and generally improve human health.

• Save cost:

Cost of production

Cost of energy consumption

Health cost

Environmental maintenance cost.

One can by now already infer that recycling as a waste management process will save cost for everyone involved and leave a few more bucks in our pockets directly or indirectly.

Recycling as an environmental waste management solution is one endeavor that has more advantages than disadvantages. When properly employed, it will not only contribute to solving the issue of climate change, it will impact water and environmental integrity, saving the lives of both humans, fishes, birds, and other animals, improve social justice.