Zero waste, circular economy, sustainability impact the bottom line

What is zero waste? In manufacturing zero waste's goal is to reuse left over materials from the manufacturing of products, putting them back into the process to manufacture new products. Zero waste can also be carried out when a manufacturer of a product that is recyclable takes it back to its facility to reuse recycled product in the production of a new similar product. This closely resembles circular economy, but not completely, because all older products cannot be brought back for feed for reproduction, due to possible hazardous and toxic contaminants, asbestos being one.

The construction industry is continuously toiling to bring construction and demolition debris to zero waste to reduce, reuse, recycle, and salvage, but the construction industry is only accomplishing a 95% recycling rate. Again, hazardous and toxic wastes, like asbestos, are one of the problems standing in the way of 100% recycling.

Although recycling and zero waste are becoming a way of life, to get to zero waste takes hard work and constant diligent-awareness of how to avoid creating waste.

Recycling will continue to eliminate waste to the landfill, especially in the construction debris area. This was proven to me when I met the chief environmental engineer for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), Thomas Abdallah, who is faced with a herculean challenge of dealing daily with a subway system that is more than 100 years old. How Abdallah sleeps at night, I haven't been able to figure out. As I got to know Abdallah, I found him to be a "in the present thinker" but always looking to the future of how to improve the system and how to eliminate wastes, like asbestos, that are a constant pain. Abdallah recently told me that in the last renovation project he recycled 95% of the construction debris.

But the MTA doesn't manufacture; it provides transportation. So when improvements are made to the 100-year-old system, recycling becomes of great importance.

Our future is to think in terms of how nature works, i.e. re-fertilize to create a new crop, thus a circular economy.

A circular economy is going to take persistence and time to create, but it will be our environmental savior once created.

I recently met with the Armstrong flooring and tile company's Andy Lake, recycling infrastructure processing specialist, in charge of bringing used ceiling tile back into the manufacturing system. Lake arranged the meeting with his ceiling group and Armstrong's floor tile group headed by Lisa Y. Cavataio.

My observation of these two groups was that they are diligently working to develop Armstrong into a circular economy company by bringing back ceiling and floor tile to its birth for fertilizer for a new crop of building materials.

Lake and Cavataio, like Abdullah, are present and future thinkers.

The examples above are people who are environmentally conscious and are aware of the importance of sustainability, understanding what it means to the future of our environment and to the company's bottom line.

Utilities will be forced to figure out tough environmental issues

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, a fairly reliable publication, titled "U.S. Electricity Use on Wane."

The article cites the fact that although we have more electronic gadgets than ever before "electricity use is barely growing," challenging our nation's utilities.

I am sure that we all feel sorry for the utilities, because they now have to rethink how they can find a new way to hold us hostage.

To help solve this financial problem, most of the large utilities will invest in transmission of electricity, abandoning electrical generation. This will allow them to see higher returns, because they no longer have to maintain the generating stations.

I would bet a dollar that solar panels, wind farms and waste-to-energy facilities played a role in the aforementioned reduction in profits, besides the economy and the movement of manufacturing to other countries.

But what are going to be the consequences of utilities investing in the transmission of electricity as opposed to generating it?

The utility industry is in an evolution period, it is slowly evolving from generator to transmitter (think manufacturing of electricity to landlord, renting us their transmission lines, in part, because the growth and use of new cleaner technologies, such as solar, wind and WTE). All of these technologies will grow in use and become a necessity, helping us lessen our carbon footprint, making it imminent to put them to use.

WTE is coming into its own. Because of diminishing landfill space and the problems with siting new landfills, it will become a necessity just as landfill mining will. We will eventually put a WTE facility on every landfill allowing the generation of power and the digging up of recyclables for reuse. This will lessen our carbon footprint and strengthen our reuse of recyclable resources.

Utilities are slow to change and only move when they are forced to, because they don't have to, they are our utilities. Also, they have proven to be the financial staple that pays better than average dividends. Now financial stability is threatened. Although the utilities' challenge is to generate more income, they will be faced with larger and more onerous definitive financial and environmental issue that they must figure out a way to solve by answering the following questions:

How does the utility clean-up all of their retired generating stations with their toxic, hazardous and regulated waste contamination?

Where does the utility find the money to clean-up these retired assets?

Is there enough landfill space to take the amount of hazardous, toxic and regulated wastes the retired assets will generate?

How do we head off the disaster that is going to happen if we don't find and use technology to take these wastes permanently out of our environment?

I understand that the utilities have to scramble to keep ahead of the financial curve, but the looming disaster will do worse damage. If they don't act now, they will be buried by their own toxins.

The only four things we are given in life

I teach my children that we only have four things in this world.

The four things are:

*Our health. If you don't take care of your health it won't take care of you.

*Time. If you don't spend your time constructively, it is a waste of time.

*People. If you are not good to other people, they will not be good to you.

*Our Earth, the ground and water.

Let's explore these four things.

We know if we eat right and exercise regularly the chances of staying healthy are good, but on the other hand, if we smoke, drink excessively, and over eat, especially fatty foods, we pay for it with sickness and an early death.

We know that wasting time accomplishes nothing, but if we spend our time constructively, it generally pays off.

We know that if we are polite, kind and express good will toward people, and help those in need, they will always be grateful and kind to us.

We know that the Earth is our survival. We cultivate it for food, so we can be nourished; it is the land we live on. It is our life's blood. Without it, we would not exist. A good part of the Earth is our water, ocean, lakes and our reservoirs, from which we get the pure water we drink.

Like our health, we must treat Earth with the best physical ability we can: nurture and cultivate the soil, treat it with nutrients to maintain the soils rich content, irrigate the soil with non-polluted water and not abuse or over-use the soil by draining it of its nutrients or polluting it with hazardous, toxic or regulated substances.

When we abuse our body, waste our time, or mistreat other people, the abuse of the body makes us ill with heart disease or cancer or maybe both, the waste of time catches up to us as we age, because we see what we could have done, but didn't and when we mistreat other people, we have no friends to be there when we need them, because we were not there when they needed us.

It is difficult to overcome the aforementioned, but not impossible. The key, to build back our health, this is possible with technology and modern medicine, which gives us enough time to overcome our shortcomings and be kind to other people, giving us sustainable living.

We are now in the difficult period of taking care of our earth, but not impossible. We are over-landfilled; over-polluted; have an ocean full of garbage; and global warming causing disastrous hurricanes.

Therefore, our New Year's resolution must be to stop our earth's deterioration, reduce, reuse and recycle; make sustainability a priority and develop technology that stops hazardous pollutants.

This will all give us good health, more time, and a chance to be good to others.

Waste is a perpetual and eternal problem

We all agree that waste has become a Herculean issue.

We do it every day -- throw garbage in the waste basket (if we recycle we should have no waste basket), send it to a garbage dump (an evil necessity) or to the waste-to-energy facility (best available technology for now), and send hazardous and regulated waste to a regulated landfill (not a good thing at all).

Waste, easily thrown away, is a very complex issue that is not so easily dealt with in its travel to its final destination, the landfill, which should be avoided at all costs. Waste has been around as long as man, but we are only at the inception of the desire to create a zero waste society. A great accomplishment -- when we accomplish it.

We see that waste problems, garbage, C&D, hazardous and regulated; they are quickly escalating with population growth. When it comes to waste, are we and the companies we deal with overwhelmed because technologies are not developed and used (most important word) fast enough? Are we a society of "throw it in a landfill" the easiest and cheapest way, especially with hazardous and regulated wastes? Why do we take waste from one Superfund Site and eventually create another? Does someone know the answer?

Companies are obligated by federal laws. If a public company, they are mandated by federal laws and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to deal with hazardous and regulated waste to eliminate the creation of future liabilities that their stockholders and, inevitably, us taxpayers will be forced to bear the burden of the costly financial clean-up.

I live in New York City. Sandy put my power out for five days, nothing compared to the havoc and devastation that it caused on the waterfronts of the outer boroughs. Gov. Andrew Cuomo stated that hurricanes are becoming a way of life and we must start to protect ourselves.

When power was on and I was able to get back into my office, I received a call from the largest asbestos litigation law firms in New York, asking how much and where did I think the asbestos was in homes and buildings that had been destroyed by Sandy. I figure once he knew the answer, he would contact the home and building owners to tell them they were exposed to asbestos and his firm could get them compensation (pre-ambulance chasing). I put him off to Mark Drozdov, knowledgeable asbestos consultant.

That afternoon I read an article in Waste Connections stating that Steve Last, waste management engineer and expert on landfills, said the region affected by Sandy has the largest concentrations of old abandon landfill sites in the world. Because of the amount of moisture and erosion created by Sandy, landfills could start to emit methane and explode causing injury and death.

Now you have to ask yourself, if the aforementioned is correct, what happens to the hazardous waste and regulated wastes, such as asbestos, when these landfills explode?

Corporate Leaders: Don’t Allow the Landfilling of Hazardous and Regulated Waste Haunt Us!

The holiday season is coming: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year’s.

I am asking the corporate leaders who claim aggressive recycling programs and zero waste to landfills to think during this holiday season in terms of zero hazardous waste and zero regulated waste to landfills.

I would bet my Halloween pumpkin that no corporation wants to admit the extent of their hazardous or regulated waste environmental liabilities or even the fact that they have asbestos or any other hazardous or regulated wastes in their facilities and/or stored in landfills, a huge negative to the corporate bottom line!

I give presentations and demonstrations of my process that stops asbestos cradle-to-grave liability and I thought you might be interested in some of the corporate feedback I received.

Environmental Manager, Major City Utility: “Our CEO will be retired by the time this comes back to haunt us.”

Senior Vice President Legal and General Council of one of the largest oil and refinery companies in the world: “I spoke to our environmental department and they said it’s not necessary to destroy our asbestos, we landfill it.” Not a wise decision.

Head Environmental Attorney for a major Fortune 500 company: “The next building we buy with asbestos, we’ll call you.” I walked away and asked myself what about all the asbestos you presently have in all your many facilities around the world?

My favorite: I was asked to speak at an Asbestos Litigation Conference. Asbestos litigation is a multibillion dollar industry that the legal profession possibly spends more money on advertisement than Coca Cola. Why in God’s name would asbestos litigation lawyers want to hear from me, when maybe I can start to solve the asbestos problem? They really didn’t. It was my turn to speak, the moderator, an attorney, purposely used up my time leaving me two minutes. I saw this coming so I rapped off all the positives about ridding our environment of asbestos. He then made this brilliant remark: “I suppose you can turn water into gold?”

 Don’t get me totally wrong, the corporate environment concerning hazardous and regulated wastes is starting to change --- slowly--- but changing.

Thus the holidays:

Halloween: If you think of hazardous and regulated wastes as Halloween with forever haunting ghosts make no mistake about it, the ghosts of these hazardous and regulated wastes will haunt the corporations through eternity unless these corporations do something about it.

Thanksgiving: It will be a great Thanksgiving in a new world when these wastes are out of our environment by aggressive corporate initiatives

Christmas and Hanukkah:  The gift of Christmas and Hanukkah to all will be technological solutions to the hazardous and regulated waste problems with rigorous implementation of these technologies mandated by corporate leaders.

The New Year: Solving these problems will provide a myriad of New Years with corporate sustainability and corporate financial stability through many generations, and most importantly, a glorious future of a healthy environment for our families, our children and our grandchildren.

Postal Service can learn from the waste Industry

Agency should embrace technology to reduce footprint, create jobs

By: Tony Nocito, ABCOV® Conversion Systems, LLC

My friend, John Crudele, who writes three plus columns a week for the New York Post on economic issues and one on personal financial advice, has written several articles concerning the Post Office’s financial debacle.

In John’s last article he addresses the massive $5.2 billion loss the Postal Service has suffered in the last three months.  In previous articles and in the last article as well, he addresses the fact that stamp forgery is one of the issues that have caused this loss.

I like John. He’s got a unique sense of humor (read his column), we play golf, have dinner and have lunch several times a year. But as much as I agree with John, over 99% of what he writes and predicts is true, my personal opinion is that stamp forgery may be an issue, but only a small issue compared to the explosion in electronic technology.

John says that if a real businessperson took over the Post Office they won’t allow their stamps to be forged.

A real businessperson wouldn’t walk into a business that is colossal, out of control and losing $20 billion plus a year. They would let the taxpayer continue to pay. But if a businessperson did run the Postal Service, there would be immediate and drastic cut backs in every sector. Then they would look for or have developed new technologies that eliminate all physical mail, except packages, and maybe, Certified Mail.

Now think about the positive effect this mail technology would have on our environment: no junk mail; a lot less motor vehicles on the road; a lot less garbage to dispose; a lot less paper to recycle; a lot less carbon emissions; and a lot less traffic. GREEN AS HELL--- RIGHT!

Well you say, what about the people who work at the Postal Service?  They will be unemployed and our unemployment rate is too high now!

The answer: retrain the people who work for the Postal Service to use the new technology.

Just as the waste industry is retraining everyone who has garbage (that’s everyone) by restricting weekly pick-up to one garbage bag, and requiring recycling or, in some cases, if you don’t recycle, no garbage pick-up. The aforementioned is starting to become law in many states.

The waste industry is consistently reinventing and developing itself with new technologies to deal with the colossal ever growing problems of waste disposal and landfill space shortage.

Instead of technology eliminating jobs in the waste industry, it has created jobs.

Think about it Postal Service!  

Zero Waste – Zero Waste – Zero Waste

By Tony Nocito 

The Planning Group of the Zero waste International Alliance defines zero waste as: “Zero waste is a goal that is ethical, economical, efficient and visionary, to guide people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources  for other use."

I recently posted this question on Linkedin: Why do companies claim zero waste when they continue to send their hazardous waste to a landfill causing incalculable future liabilities to their companies and their stakeholders?

I received quite a number of intelligent comments from individuals all over the world, many of whom are in the waste business or deal with waste in their jobs.

The consensus was that zero waste claimed by companies is hype or rhetoric used to make the companies look greener and some thought that there is no such thing as zero waste.

Most were in agreement that all people should constantly and vigorously strive to reuse, reduce and recycle (3Rs) or make the generator of the waste responsible for its waste. These aforementioned approaches to dealing with waste must become a way of life for all. There is also a consensus: If it can’t be recycled, don’t make it – good point!

It is estimated that $11.4 Billion in recyclable materials are landfilled in the U.S. every year. Not only is this a waste (pardon the pun) of the landfill space, but also a flagrant waste of valuable materials that are made from natural resources.

More and more manufacturers are recycling materials used to manufacture their products back into  newly manufactured products, by salvaging and reusing the leftovers. This is why they claim zero waste. This recycling approach supports a solid bottom line and supports good environmental sustainability, but this is only one form of zero waste.

The employs of the manufacturing facilities, or any employee for that fact, can recycle all the paper, plastic, glass, aluminum, food, if there is a composting station on site, etc. leaving zero waste when they leave work. They also should and can do the same at home, as we all should.

The truth is not everyone has a car, not everyone has a TV, and not everyone has a computer, but everyone creates waste of one kind or another.

Landfills were named landfills, because they were usually holes in the ground that could be filled, but landfill space is a scarcity. Today they are mountains of garbage, taking in millions of tons more garbage each year and releasing tons of noxious gasses. It is estimated that 1.3 billion tons of municipal solid waste will become 2.6 billion tons of municipal solid waste in the next decade. Where are we going to put this waste?

Old landfills that are not Superfund sites needing to be cleaned up have a use: capturing of methane gas for use in power plants and vehicles, provide space for the construction of Wind Power Turbines, and provide space for the construction of Solar Panels.

Landfill mining, the digging up of a landfill to recapture and remove recyclables from the landfill, therefore increasing the landfill space, is becoming a trend, as well as dumping a garbage truck at the gate before it enters the landfill to separate out of the recyclables.

Towns, cities and states are requiring mandatory recycling or no garbage pickup.

The purpose of striving towards the 3Rs and zero waste is a matter of our sustainability through the elimination of Landfilling waste as much as possible. The reality is that we are running out of landfill space and no one wants new landfills in their backyard, nor do they want incineration, even if it is waste to energy, although waste to energy will become more of a reality in our future.

The aforementioned has addressed the two zero waste initiatives that we are and should continually strive for, business recycling and personal recycling. Although we are starting to make some progress in the war against waste, we must keep a diligent and constant awareness every time we plan to discard something --- anything: we should think about the future and our children, asking ourselves: do I want land to be used for garbage or do I want land to be used for farming?

The third most daunting and hardest to address is hazardous, toxic and regulated waste disposal.  How do we accomplish zero hazardous, toxic and regulated waste? 

If we are running out of space for everyday garbage, what are we doing about hazardous, toxic and regulated wastes landfilling? Asbestos, which is imbedded in 5,000 matrices, permeates our environment and when removed is extremely space consuming when landfilled, provides perpetual liability to its owner and can be of no benefit to after landfill reuse. One cannot build over the asbestos cell in a landfill in fear of disturbing the asbestos and contaminating the neighborhood.

Because most of these hazardous, toxic and regulated wastes are in industry’s facilities, it is up to industry to seek out, find, and invest in research to create new technologies to solve the hazardous waste problem or use existing technologies to rid their facility and our environment of these hazardous wastes. We cannot keep sending them to the landfill where they will create unstable and unusable land, incalculable liability for present and future stockholders, and could continue to poison us.

To rid our environment of these hazardous waste is a major challenge to industry that can only be solved with investment in technologies that provide sustainability to our environment. In order to do this, industry must first admit that they have these hazardous materials in their facilities. Then address the problems in the most environmentally friendly and sustainable way.

Industry is in business to create jobs and turn a profit. Industry is also in business for the long haul and the long haul must be profitable.

Land preservation, recycling, eliminating landfilling of hazardous wastes all lead to sustainability, which is our future. Sustainability leads to the long haul by allowing profits to continue well into the future, creating jobs and making better lives. The use of and investment in technologies that eliminates and reduces waste and hazards in our environment are of utmost importance to develop and achieve as close to zero waste as possible. Without waste treatment technologies that provide sustainability, there will be no environment in our future.