Page 31 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

Ch001-P373623.qxd 3/22/07 5:25 PM Page 12
Sustainable Industrial Design and Waste Management
12
• Landfill operation requires high capital cost.
• The leachate collection and treatment facility and gas collection
system might require huge capital.
• Natural resources are depleted.

1.6 Zero Pollution and 7Rs Rule

The rate of waste generated is increasing with population rate and social
standards, i.e. the more advanced and wealthy societies (individuals) pro-
duce more waste. The amount of municipal waste for 2004 according to the
Global Waste Management Market Report (Research and Markets, 2004) is
about 1.82 billion tons with a 7% increase compared to 2003. The amount
of waste is estimated to rise by 31% in 2008 to reach nearly 2.5 billion tons.
This huge amount would cover the total continent of Australia at a thick-
ness of 1 mm. Meanwhile, finding new sources of raw material is becoming
costly and difficult. Concurrently, the cost of safe disposal of waste is esca-
lating exponentially and even locating waste disposal sites is becoming
more difficult. As a result, a new hierarchy for waste management to approach
full utilization of waste is a must, which starts from reduction at source,
reuse, recycle and sustainable treatment for possible material recovery for
conservation of natural resources.
In the past, people’s dream was to turn sand into gold. Today, the dream
is to turn waste and pollution into gold. This was a dream until the new
hierarchy to approach zero pollution was developed at the American Univer-
sity in Cairo (El-Haggar, 2001c) and the 6Rs Golden Rule was initiated
(El-Haggar, 2003c). That is, the rule aims at Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling
waste. The fourth R of the 6Rs Golden Rule emphasizes the Recovering of
raw materials from waste through sustainable treatment. The last 2Rs are
Rethinking and Renovation where people should rethink about their waste
before taking action for treatment and develop renovation-innovative tech-
niques to solve the problem. Another R should be added at the top to the
previous 6Rs, which is Regulation; without Regulation nothing will be
implemented. It is very important to add Regulation to the system and enforce
the 6Rs Golden Rule into the management system. So the 7Rs Golden
Rule encompasses Regulation, Reducing, Reusing, Recycling, Recovering,
Rethinking and Renovation as the basic tools for zero pollution (El-Haggar,
2004a). The rule provides a methodology to manipulate current activities to
approach zero pollution and avoid landfill, incineration and/or traditional
treatment. This approach is based on the concept of adapting the best prac-
ticable environmental option for individual waste streams and dealing with
waste as a byproduct. This 7Rs Golden Rule for zero pollution can be con-
sidered the Sustainable Waste Management Hierarchy for Zero Pollution
and the Industrial Ecology Hierarchy for Zero Pollution as will be explained
in Chapter 3. Fortunately, with full success, the theory was practically applied