Finding a correct destination to wastes that nobody noticed any potential for recycling and to make them return, as raw material, to the industry, has been being a great challenge to the companies that deal with waste that seemed fated to be forever on the landfills.
The industrial waste management can be understood as the set of activities related to the collection, transportation, manipulation, treatment, elimination or recycling from these wastes. It evolves a complex relationship among administrative, financial, legal, planning and engineering aspects, whose relations are from many spheres.
It is necessary to change the used methodology of the natural resources when we talk about processing and discarding to a sustainable logic, in which the materials are, most of them, recycled and reused.
This reasoning would open big perspectives for the use of new materials, productive processes and, consequently, new businesses. The responsibility must be passed to all the companies’ levels, specially to the professionals evolved with the waste management.
Promoting more and more, inside the industrial environment, the philosophy of sustainability, that integrates 5 actions (not generate, reduce the generation, recycle, treatment and disposal), brings up the social and environmental responsibility, capable of reaching individuals, part of this system.
Internal programs of waste management
The basic premise from a program of solid waste management in a company or multinational company, begins with the traceability of the generated waste. For this, it is necessary to use a software or a capable management system, that englobes, in an integrated way, all the phases from the waste life cycle.
Identifying all the information, since the waste generation until its disposal, is fundamental. Monitoring the volume and the kind, the generation date, the packaging and the storage, which operational team is responsible for the collection and in which time it will be done.
The packaging and the storage are very specific criteria that must respect the environmental law. The packaging refers to the space in which the waste will be deposited until being forward to the storage place, collected and led to the final destination.
Understanding the logistics and tracing the information simplifies the management process, improves the operational and administrative visibility and eliminates the registering and the manual control. To work the effectiveness of the waste management it is necessary basic functionalities: collection routes organization (team, place and time), registration of the collected waste, validation of the information in the collection places, capture of photographical evidences from the collecting and the possibility of sending reports.
Know some initiatives
With a good dose of initiative, the search for social innovation on the current business’ models, has been shown possible. Encouraging solutions economically viable for almost all kinds of waste is fundamental for this change.
In the Worldwide Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, some of the biggest companies – Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, Coke, Danone and others – compromised themselves for the reusing and recycling of until 70% of their plastic packaging.
The initiative has as a main goal to create basis for a circular economy. A new concept that aims a more sustainable future for the less extraction of natural resources and the less waste generation.
How does it work the principle of the Circular Economy for big companies?
The circular economy consists on a cycle of positive-continuous development, which preserves and increases the natural capital, optimizes the resources’ production and minimizes systemic risks administrating finite systems and renewable flows. It works effectively in any scale. Its main purpose is to maintain products, components and materials in their highest level of utility and value all the time.
The circular economy is based in three principles, each one of them turned to many challenges related to resources ad systemics that the industrial economy faces.
Principle 1: preserve and increase the natural capital controlling finite stocks and balancing the flows from renewable resources.
Principle 2: optimize the production of resources making products, components and material circulate on the highest level of utility all the time, both in the technical and biological cycle.
Principle 3: promote the efficacy of the system revealing the negative externalities and excluding them from the projects.
It is essential that the companies that generate wastes consider theses practices essential to become efficient the destination of the generated waste and, though, protect the environment. The cleanest production in an industrial process, through the generated waste management, demonstrates the responsibility of the company on the preservation of the natural resources’ integrity.*Source: www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.or
