Hello everyone! Welcome back to our second post on waste pollution. Before we define the term waste pollution, we will deconstruct and understand each word separately
What exactly is waste?
In its ordinary meaning, waste is considered to be “materials that are no longer needed and are thrown away” (Oxford, 2020). However, some questions may arise when scrutinizing the definition, as the saying goes: “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. To further expand on the meaning of waste for legislative accountability, the United Kingdom’s definition of waste is considered to be “useless or unsaleable” and “eliminated or thrown aside as worthless after the completion of a process” (Purdue, 1990). While the definition may be confusing, we will be commenting and providing our opinion of it at the end of this theme.
On the other hand, the term pollution can be much easier defined when looking at the module itself. As the module GE3246 is on environmental pollution, we used the definition of pollution as provided by the US EPA. Pollution is then defined as: “Any substances … that degrade the natural quality of the environment … usually impaired by the presence of pollutants and contaminants” (EPA, n.d.).
Defining waste pollution
After our first blog post investigating the different types and effects of waste pollution, we also deconstructed the meaning of waste and pollution in this post. Drawing inspirations from UK’s waste definition, we define waste pollution as:
“the improper disposal of redundant materials produced by any process that is unintentional, unusable and/or unrecoverable.”
Let us walk you through our thought process
- Unintentional targets the undesired by-products of a process, such as the production of waste gases after combustion of fossil fuel;
– - Unusable targets the substances, which by current technologies, are unable to be utilised, such as radioactive waste from the generation of nuclear power;
– - Unrecoverable plays homage to the concept of material entropy by Georgescu-Roegen. He claims that all economic processes disperse some materials into the environment. The recovering of these materials is impossible as it would take energy exceeding the total amount of energy available in the universe (Cleveland & Ruth, 1997).
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Our three “U’s” will account for the idea that waste is (1) a result of bad economic planning, (2) a result of insufficiently advanced technology to utilise it as a resource and (3) a fundamental property of the universe.
Additionally, to account for “pollution”, we mentioned the importance of proper waste management. Pollution occurs when these “redundant materials” are not disposed of properly that will result in environmental degradation.
Conclusion
We hoped that this post provided you a better understanding on how waste is defined and how legislations look at waste management. This will also be the basis when we look into the different laws surrounding waste pollution. In our future posts, we will investigate the different laws surrounding waste pollution domestically and internationally.
See you there!
Ryan
References
Cleveland, C. J., & Ruth, M. (1997). When, where, and by how much do biophysical limits constrain the economic process? A survey of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s contribution to. Ecological economics, 22, 203-223.
EPA. (n.d., 2020). Environmental Issues Terms & Acronyms. Retrieved from https://ofmpub.epa.gov/sor_internet/registry/termreg/searchandretrieve/glossariesandkeywordlists/search.do;jsessionid=A7jqOelu4zV1TkXNKeZyriwhgkqhpQxWCEuyjy2NF1_3r-MGMhFn!1911837198?details=&vocabName=Environmental%20Issues%20Glossary&filterTerm=pollution&checkedAcronym=false&checkedTerm=false&hasDefinitions=false&filterTerm=pollution&filterMatchCriteria=Contains
Oxford, L. s. D. (2020). Definition of “waste”. Retrieved from https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/waste_1
Purdue, M. (1990). Defining waste. Journal of Environmental Law, 2(2), 250-261.