The creation of waste happens at every level and scale of society—from individual homes to local and global economies.
We’ve grown accustomed to not acknowledging our overproduction of waste, or just accepting its creation is inevitable. Since waste is a human-created design flaw, it isn’t inevitable, but it is negatively impacting our environment and, therefore, the health of humans and animals.
At a grand scale, our over-consumptive society results in severe environmental destruction—impacting wildlife, ecosystems, and the livelihoods of the local communities who depend on those resources.
For example, landfills emit massive amounts of methane gas when food waste, yard waste, and other organic materials decompose inside them. In fact, landfills are some of the largest emitters of methane—a greenhouse gas more than 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide for global warming impact.
The Long-Lasting Effects of Plastics
Waste is impacting us in ways we cannot always see.
It can take centuries for plastic to biodegrade and when plastic waste goes rogue in our environment—often into waterways and eventually into the ocean—it breaks down into microplastics.
Microplastics are a form of pollution not easily cleaned up from our soil, water, or air, and they have disastrous effects on ecosystems, wildlife, and human health.
Neighborhood Waste Facilities
Our current approach to managing waste, in which we throw things away in a landfill or incinerator, also creates significant environmental injustice.
Researchers found a consistent pattern over a 30-year period of placing hazardous waste facilities in or around neighborhoods where low-income families or people of color reside. These communities often bear a disproportionate health burden from our collective waste generation.
IT Accountability Shifts
Your organization may have sustainability goals for which your department and role are accountable. Even if that’s not currently true for you, it likely will be soon, because Gartner analysts are predicting by 2025, 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization.
Our Obligation as a Society
We all contribute to the creation of waste, whether as individual consumers or within our businesses.
As a society, we all should strive to participate in the circular economy, which can be done by designing waste out of our processes and activities, prioritizing durability and reuse, and ensuring that whatever waste is generated can be easily recycled.
The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prospoerous, and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competitive.
– Paul Hawken
Learn how Mobile reCell’s software-driven solution helps businesses reduce e-waste and reuse retired devices through IT asset recovery.
Follow us on social media!
See Mobile reCell’s Recovery Platform in action.