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CHAPTER 16
SOLID AND HAZARDOUS WASTE
Outline
16-1 What are the problems related to solid waste and hazardous waste?
A. We throw away huge amounts of useful things and hazardous materials.
2. Modern humans produce huge amounts of waste that go unused and pollute.
3. Solid waste—any unwanted or discarded material we produce that is not a liquid or a gas.
a. Industrial solid waste produced by mines, agriculture, and industries that supply people with
4. Hazardous, or toxic, waste threatens human health or the environment because it is poisonous,
dangerously chemically reactive, corrosive, or flammable.
a. Examples:
i. Industrial solvents.
16-2 How should we deal with solid waste?
A. We can burn or bury solid waste or produce less of it.
2. Waste reduction in which we produce much less waste and pollution, and the wastes we do
produce are considered to be potential resources that can be reused, recycled, or composted.
3. Integrated waste management—a variety of strategies for both waste reduction and waste
management.
B. We can cut solid wastes by reducing, reusing, and recycling.
1. Waste reduction is based on three Rs:
a. Reduce: consume less and live a simpler lifestyle.
2. Strategies that industries and communities have used to reduce resource use, waste, and pollution.
a. Redesign manufacturing processes and products to use less material and energy.
b. Develop products that are easy to repair, reuse, remanufacture, compost, or recycle.
16-3 Why are refusing, reusing and recycling materials so important?
A. Reuse is an important way to reduce solid waste and pollution, and to save money.
2. Reuse involves cleaning and using materials over and over and thus increasing the typical life
span of a product.
4. In many less-developed countries, the poor scavenge in open dumps for food scraps and items
that they can reuse or sell, and are often exposed to toxins and infectious diseases.
6. To encourage people reusable bags, the governments of Ireland, Taiwan, and the Netherlands
tax plastic shopping bags.
8. Plastics industry officials have mounted a massive advertising and political campaign to
prevent such bans.
B. There are two types of recycling.
1. Recycling involves reprocessing discarded solid materials into new, useful products.
3. Primary, or closed-loop, recycling—materials are recycled into new products of the same
type.
4. Secondary recycling— waste materials converted into different products.
5. Key questions about recycling.
a. Do the items that are separated for recycling actually get recycled?
b. Do businesses, governments, and individuals complete the recycling loop by buying
products that are made from recycled materials?
C. Composting is a form of recycling that mimics nature’s recycling of nutrients.
2. The resulting organic material can be added to soil to supply plant nutrients, slow soil erosion,
retain water, and improve crop yields.
4. Some cities in Canada and in many European Union countries collect and compost more than
85% of their biodegradable wastes in centralized community facilities.
5. In the United States, about 3,000 municipal composting programs recycle about 60% of the
yard wastes in the country’s MSW.
D. Recycling has advantages and disadvantages.
2. Critics of recycling programs argue that recycling is costly and adds to the taxpayer burden in
communities where recycling is funded through taxation.
4. Critics say that recycling may make economic sense for valuable and easy-to-recycle
materials such as aluminum, paper, and steel.
5. INDIVIDUALS MATTER: Mike Biddle’s Contribution to Recycling Plastics.
Chapter 16: Solid and Hazardous Waste
a. Mike Biddle and Trip Allen designed a 16-step automated process that separates plastics
from nonplastic items in mixed waste streams and then separates plastics from each other
by type and grade and converts them to pellets that can be used to make new products.
b. The pellets are cheaper than virgin plastics.
E. We can encourage reuse and recycling.
1. Three factors hinder reuse and recycling.
a. The market prices of almost all products do not include the harmful environmental and
health costs associated with producing, using, and discarding them.
2. Ways to encourage reuse and recycling:
a. Increase subsidies and tax breaks for reusing and recycling materials and decrease
subsidies and tax breaks for making items from virgin resources.
3. Recycling is popular because it helps to soothe the consciences of people living in a
throwaway society.
4. Reducing resource consumption and reusing resources are more effective prevention
approaches to reducing the flow and waste of resources
5. SCIENCE FOCUS: Bioplastics.
a. Most of today’s plastics are made from organic polymers produced from petroleum based
16-4 What are the advantages and disadvantages of burning or burying solid waste?
A. Burning solid waste has advantages and disadvantages.
1. Globally, MSW is burned in more than 600 large waste-to-energy incinerators which use the heat
2. The United States incinerates only about 12% of its MSW.
3. Advantages of incinerating solid waste :
a. Reduces trash volume
4. Disadvantages:
a. Expensive to build
b. Produces a hazardous waste
c. Emits some CO2 and other air pollutants
d. Encourages waste production
B. Burying solid waste has advantages and disadvantages.
A. About 54%, by weight, of the MSW in the United States is buried in sanitary landfills, compared
to 80% in Canada, 15% in Japan, and 4% in Denmark.
Instructor’s Manual for Environmental Science, 15th edition
B. Sanitary landfills are where solid wastes are spread out in thin layers, compacted, and covered
daily with a fresh layer of clay or plastic foam, which helps to keep the material dry and reduces
leakage of contaminated water.
C. Open dumps are essentially fields or holes in the ground where garbage is deposited and
sometimes burned.
2. China disposes of about 85% of its solid waste in rural open dumps or in poorly designed and
poorly regulated landfills.
D. Advantages of sanitary landfills:
1. Low operating costs
3. Filled land can be used for other purposes
4. No shortage of landfill space in many areas
E. Disadvantages:
1. Noise, traffic, and dust
3. Output approach that encourages waste production
16-5 How should we deal with hazardous waste?
A. We can use integrated management of hazardous waste.
1. Integrated management establishes three levels of priority:
2. Industries try to find substitutes for toxic or hazardous materials, reuse or recycle the hazardous
materials within industrial processes, or use them as raw materials for making other products.
4. Most e-waste recycling efforts create further hazards and can result in serious threats to other
species.
5. CONNECTIONS: Cell Phones and Endangered African Gorillas.
a. Most cell phones contain coltan, a mineral extracted in the deep forests of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo in central Africa, which is also the home of the endangered lowland
gorillas. Coltan mining has dramatically reduced the gorilla habitat and contributed to the
killing of gorillas to feed the miners.
b. Recycling old cell phones reduces the need to mine coltan and helps save the remaining
lowland gorillas.
B. CASE STUDY: Recycling E-Waste
1. In some countries, workers in e-waste recycling operations are often exposed to toxic chemicals as
3. Thirty-five states have banned the disposal of computers and TV sets in landfills and incinerators
and thirteen have laws that make manufacturers responsible for recycling most electronic devices.
5. Proponents call for a standardized U.S. federal law that makes manufacturers responsible for
taking back all electronic devices they produce and recycling them domestically.
C. We Can Detoxify Hazardous Wastes
1. Biological methods for treatment of hazardous waste may be the wave of the future.
3. Phytoremediation involves using natural or genetically engineered plants to absorb, filter, and
remove contaminants from polluted soil and water.
4. Hazardous wastes can be incinerated to break them down and convert them to harmless or less
5. Detoxify hazardous wastes by using a plasma arc torch, somewhat similar to a welding torch, to
incinerate them at very high temperatures.
D. We can store some forms of hazardous waste.
2. Currently, burial on land is the most widely used method in the United States and in most
countries, largely because it is the least expensive of all methods.
a. The most common form of burial is deep-well disposal.
i. Liquid hazardous wastes are pumped under pressure through a pipe into dry,
porous rock formations far beneath aquifers that are tapped for drinking and
irrigation water.
ii. Cost is low and the wastes can often be retrieved if problems develop.
iii. Problems with deep-well disposal:
iv. Limited number of such sites and limited space within them.
E. CASE STUDY: Hazardous Waste Regulation in the United States
1. About 5% of all hazardous waste produced in the United States is regulated under the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA, pronounced “RICKra”).
2. EPA sets standards for the management of several types of hazardous waste and issues permits to
3. Cradle-to-grave system keeps track of waste from a point of generation (cradle) to an approved
off-site disposal facility (grave).
4. About 95% of the hazardous and toxic wastes, including e-waste, produced in the United States is
not regulated.
6. Goal of the Superfund program are to identify sites (called Superfund sites) and to clean them up
on a priority basis.
7. Brownfields are abandoned industrial and commercial sites such as factories, junkyards, older
landfills, and gas stations that can be cleaned up and reborn as parks, nature reserves, athletic
fields, eco-industrial parks, and neighborhoods.
F. CASE STUDY: Lead Is a Highly Toxic Pollutant.
1. The chemical element lead does not break down in the environment.
3. Each year, 12,000–16,000 American children younger than age 9 are treated for acute lead
poisoning, and about 200 die.
5. Between 1976 and 2004, the percentage of U.S. children ages one to five years with blood lead
levels above the safety standard dropped from 85% to just 1.4%.
6. 130–200 million children around the world are at risk of lead poisoning, and 15–18 million
children in less-developed countries have permanent brain damage because of lead poisoning.
16-6 How can we make the transition to a more sustainable low-waste economy?
A. Grassroots action has led to better solid and hazardous waste management.
1. Individuals have organized to prevent the construction of hundreds of incinerators, landfills,
3. A call for drastically reducing production of such wastes by emphasizing pollution prevention and
using the precautionary principle.
B. Providing environmental justice for everyone is an important goal.
1. Environmental justice is an ideal whereby every person is entitled to protection from
2. A larger share of polluting factories, hazardous waste dumps, incinerators, and landfills in the
3. In general, toxic waste sites in Caucasian communities have been cleaned up faster and more
completely than such sites in African American and Latino communities.
C. International treaties have reduced hazardous waste.
1. For decades, some more-developed countries had been shipping hazardous wastes to less-
developed countries.
2. Since 1992, international treaty known as the Basel Convention has banned participating countries
from shipping hazardous waste to or through other countries without their permission.
3. Hazardous waste smugglers evade the laws by using an array of tactics.
4. In 2000, delegates from 122 countries completed a global treaty called the Stockholm Convention
on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) to control 12 persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
a. POPs are widely used toxic chemicals that can accumulate in the fatty tissues of humans and
5. In 2000, the Swedish Parliament enacted a law that, by 2020, will ban all chemicals that are
persistent in the environment and that can accumulate in living tissue.
D. We can make the transition to low-waste societies.
1. Many environmental scientists argue that we can make a transition to a low-waste society by
understanding and following key principles:
2. Case Study Industrial Ecosystems: Copying Nature
Chapter 16: Solid and Hazardous Waste
a. Make industrial manufacturing processes cleaner and more sustainable by redesigning them to
mimic how nature deals with wastes, with the waste outputs of one organism become the
nutrient inputs of another organism.
E. The three big ideas for this chapter:
1. The order of priorities for dealing with solid waste should be to produce less of it, reuse, and
recycle as much of it as possible and safely burn or bury what is left.
3. We need to view solid wastes as wasted resources and hazardous wastes as materials that we
should not be producing in the first place.
Objectives
16-1 What are solid waste and hazardous waste, and why are they problems?
CONCEPT 16-1A Solid waste contributes to pollution and includes valuable resources that could be reused or
recycled.
Concept 16-1B Hazardous waste contributes to pollution, as well as to natural capital degradation, health
problems, and premature deaths.
1. Define solid waste, municipal solid waste, industrial solid waste, and hazardous waste and give
16-2 How should we deal with solid waste?
CONCEPT 16-2 A sustainable approach to solid waste is first to produce less of it, then to reuse or recycle it,
and finally to safely dispose of what is left.
1. Compare waste management and waste reduction approaches to solid and hazardous waste. Discuss
2. Define reduce, reuse and recycling. Note reduce, reuse and recycling strategies.
16-3 Why is reusing and recycling materials so important?
CONCEPT 16-3 By refusing and reusing resources and by reusing and recycling what we use, we decrease our
consumption of matter and energy resources, reduce pollution and natural capital degradation, and save money.
1. Distinguish between primary, or closed-loop, recycling and secondary recycling; materials-recovery
16-4 What are the advantages and disadvantages of burning or burying solid waste?
CONCEPT 16-4 Technologies for burning and burying solid wastes are well developed, but burning can
contribute to air and water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and buried wastes can contribute to water
pollution.
2. Compare sanitary landfills to open dumps. Note the disadvantages and advantages of burying wastes.
Instructor’s Manual for Environmental Science, 15th edition
16-5 How should we deal with hazardous waste?
CONCEPT 16-5 A more sustainable approach to hazardous waste is first to produce less of it, then to reuse or
recycle it, then to convert it to less hazardous materials, and finally to safely store what is left.
1. List the three priorities of hazardous waste management. Summarize the problem of e-waste. List
3. Discuss the problem of lead toxicity in the United States and globally.
16-6 How can we make the transition to a more sustainable low-waste society?
CONCEPT 16-6 Shifting to a low-waste economy will require individuals and organizations to reduce resource
use and to recycle most solid and hazardous wastes at local, national, and global levels.
1. Summarize the goals of the environmental justice movement. Describe the effect of international
treaties on regulation of hazardous waste. List four ways to make a transition to a low-waste society.
Key Terms
composting
closed-loop primary
recycling
municipal solid waste MSW
open dumps
primary closed-loop
sanitary landfills
secondary recycling
solid waste
Teaching Tips
Introduce this topic by discussing the Core Case Study.
• Ask an older student how many stereos, television sets, cell phones, or computers he/she has had.
• Ask what happened to them when replacement units were bought.
• Ask him/her why they were not simply repaired and reused.
• Explain the cradle-to-grave approach of the European Union.
Discussion Topics
1. What are the past, present, and future options for disposal or treatment of solid waste?
2. What are some examples of hazardous waste and their health effects? Define hazardous waste and
3. What are several conservation measures and what role does recycle, reuse, and reduce play in waste
management?
Activities and Projects
1. Visit a community recycling center and observe its operations. If no recycling program for household
waste is available in your vicinity, why not lobby for one or set one up as a class project?
2. Does your state require refundable deposits on all beer and soft-drink containers? If so, investigate the
3. Invite a city or county official responsible for solid waste disposal to discuss related economic,
5. Invite a toxicologist to visit your class and discuss the problem of metal toxicity.
7. Encourage your students to find out how your school and community dispose of waste. Are recycling
centers available? Are they conveniently located? What materials do they accept? Do any local
factories or other industries accept waste for recycling? How much is recycled? Would a source
separation program be feasible?
8. Have students who live at home maintain a record of solid waste discarded by their families in the
course of one week. What percentage of this material could actually be recycled?
9. As a class, survey excess packaging in various products at local supermarkets. (Ask permission first;
many supermarket managers are cooperative, but some are not.) Make up ecological ratings for each
10. Is classic lead poisoning a serious health problem in your community? Have your students consult with
11. Organize a campus clean-up and take pictures and count the bags collected.
Instructor’s Manual for Environmental Science, 15th edition
Attitudes and Values Assessment
1. Have you visited a landfill? How did you feel during your visit?
2. Have you visited an incinerator? How did you feel during your visit?
3. Have you visited a recycling center? How did you feel during your visit?
4. Do you feel that natural ecosystems will be able to continue to absorb the wastes from human
activities?
10. Would you support a law requiring everyone to separate their trash into paper, bottles, aluminum cans,
steel cans, and glass for recycling and to separate all food and yard waste for composting?
11. Would you support a law that bans all throwaway bottles, cans, and plastic containers and requires that
all beverage and food containers be reusable (refillable)?
12. Would you support a law requiring that at least 60 % of all municipal solid waste be recycled, reused,
or composted?
13. Would you support a law banning the construction of any incinerators or landfills for disposal of
hazardous or solid waste until at least 60% of all municipal solid waste is recycled, reused, or
composted and the production of industrial hazardous waste has been reduced by 60%?
14. Have you ever visited a landfill or incinerator that handles hazardous waste? How did you feel?
15. Should industries and other producers of hazardous waste be allowed to inject such waste into deep
underground wells?
16. Would you support a law banning the emission of any hazardous chemicals into the environment, with
the understanding that many products you use now would cost more and some would no longer be
made?
Chapter 16: Solid and Hazardous Waste
Laboratory Skills
Wells, Edward. Lab Manual for Environmental Science. 2009. Lab #19 Are we consuming our biosphere?
News Videos
Who pays the price for technology?, The Brooks/Cole Environmental Science Video Library 2009, ©2011,
DVD ISBN-13: 978-0-538-73355-7
Jean Suppliers Pollution, The Brooks/Cole Environmental Science Video Library 2009, ©2011, DVD
ISBN-13: 978-0-538-73355-7
Additional Video Resources
Erin Brockovich
True story of a single mother who becomes a legal assistant and almost single-handedly brings down a
California power company accused of polluting a city's water supply.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0195685/
American Experience: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (PBS Documentary Series)
This episode looks at the biologist who first brought the devastating effects of DDT to the public attention.
http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=2792206
Web Resources
Earth 911
A valuable resource for recycling and sustainability.
http://earth911.org/
