Waste. Every company creates it, in some form or another. For some materials, the path to recycling is clear – paper, plastics, and industry specific waste that has a known reuse within your sector or a related one.

But what about the less obvious materials, the ones for which you have no feasible reuse, and therefore pay disposal fess, month after month? Is that the end of story, a “necessary evil” you must resign yourself to?

Not if Recycle Match can help it.

Much like eBay has created a global market on the consumer items that previously sat in people’s homes or were thrown away, Recycle Match seeks to match up those who generate either one-time or regular streams of hard-to-recycle materials, with those seeking that material for their own use.

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Like many countries, Thailand has an issue with waste.  From buildings, to manufacturing and agriculture, to consumer goods and tourism leftovers, mountains of garbage go to landfill each year. Agriculture alone in Thailand churns out 58,190,000 tons of refuse annually (Land Development Department, Government of Thailand).  Think about that the next time you frolic on a Thai beach. 

Throughput of industrial system today, from source to end consumer, ends up in landfills or incinerator.  For every truckload of product with lasting value, 32 truckloads of waste are produced.  On a finite planet, it doesn’t take a genius to realize this sort of system is totally unsustainable. 

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The Internet is becoming a great tool for getting information on facilities that are emitting air pollution, discharging water pollution, and generating hazardous wastes. In the past, this information was difficult for the public to access, and in some cases either was not made available to the public, or required a Freedom of Information Act filing to obtain. This is changing as more states and the federal government is making this information available on line.

The latest effort comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which has released enforcement results for fiscal year 2009, and has developed a new Web-based tool and interactive map that allows the public to get detailed information by location about the enforcement actions taken at approximately 4,600 facilities.

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We are living in a world where high consumption has been relentlessly praised, suggesting that we should buy, consume and dispose more stuff than our grandparents used to do. With some nations consuming more than others, the quality and quantity of waste varies across borders. And so does the way it is managed.

A conventional method for waste management is to dump the waste into designated landfill areas where it is left for years without being monitored. Landfill activity remains the most commonly used organized waste disposal method in the world. It is also the easiest and the cheapest. However, brimful landfill sites, hazardous waste and uncontrolled greenhouse gases cause greater environmental and economical impacts. As a simple example, part of the carbon content of the waste when it is dumped into a landfill site, is emitted into the atmosphere in the form of methane, which has a greenhouse effect 20 times greater than that of CO2.

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Singapore is a bustling city state at the southern tip of peninsular Malaysia.  Independent from Malaysia since 1965, it has a dense population of 4.7 million people crammed into 269 sq. miles (697 sq. km)—  that’s roughly 3.5x the size of Washington D.C.

In spite of its lacking land mass, the tiny country is a major economic hub in Southeast Asia and boasts one of the best standards of living of any Asian city, and even rivals many metropolis overseas.

It’s a city that is well planned, tightly regulated, visually attractive, and thankfully lacking the woeful pollution that afflict other centers like Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Waste and the City

All the economic activity and large population of course is not without its downside: waste.  In 2008 the total volume of solid waste had reached 5.97 million tons.  Luckily, according to government figures, roughly 2.24 million tons (approx. 56%) of this was recycled.  That still left a lot left to deal with.

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While policy momentum behind biofuels has sputtered in recent months due in part to a slumping economy, indirect land use change debates, and life cycle studies concluding that “green” fuels cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels, using waste as a fuel feedstock represents a promising shortcut on the path to energy security.

Waste-to-fuel is nothing new, but it remains a vastly underdeveloped alternative despite being cheap, abundant, and according to the EPA, renewable. More recently, a convergence of environmental, economic, and energy factors have bolstered the development of increasingly innovative waste-to-energy solutions.

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Coal is dirty. Nuclear is dangerous. Wind and solar are intermittent. Trash is a constant, which brings us to landfill gas.

People throw things away. They recycle, sure, but consider all the waste in the world the next time you unpack your groceries. Product packaging alone can fill your trash can after one trip to the supermarket.

Garbage goes into landfills, where it decomposes,  and creates methane, a gas much more potent than the whipping boy, carbon dioxide. For years, landfills have gotten rid of this gas, which builds up inside, by flaring it off. Burning it, wasting it.

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