Municipal Waste Management

 

Municipal Waste Management

At the municipal level, pollution prevention requires major changes in consumer patterns and lifestyles. The general public, while genuinely concerned and knowledgeable about the environment, has not received widespread education on preventive techniques, nor are there many choices in selecting more environmentally friendly forms of consumer products from among the items that support our lifestyles. We may look at the hundreds of millions of tons of solid waste generated each year worldwide as an enormous and costly waste disposal effort that continues to deplete our natural resources and requires enormous ongoing expenditures, or we may view these wastes as a virtual gold mine of resources from which useful byproducts and energy can be recovered. By the same token, resource recovery, WTE (waste-to-energy), and recycling strategies do not entirely eliminate solid waste disposal problems, and further, they only make sense when such strategies are economically viable.