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摘要

Recently I was asked to define household waste to lay people. Lay people with respect to environmental management, that is. They were all professionals of some field. So what is household waste? It does not exist in nature or on the market. It is produced by families in the residences. The emphasis is on produced! How so? If you have a banana or potato peel, this is not waste. It is a food residue that can be composted and returned to the cropland. If you have a used sheet of writing paper or some pieces of cardboard, this is not waste either. It is a cellulose residue that can be collected and returned to the paper machine. If you have broken glass bottles, this is not waste either. It is glass residue that can be collected and returned to bottle manufacture. No waste so far, only residue. Now, as soon as families decide to mix all those items and stuff them into a single bag to be put out for collection, they produce waste because then neither residue can be used again. The mixture settles at the state of maximum disorder where it will happily remain forever, no matter where the bag is taken. Waste is not a byproduct of manufactured goods or agricultural produce. It is a product of human behavior. The residue world cup aims at changing that product. It is proposed here as an exercise to measure the fraction of people in any particular country or community who refrain from transforming residues into waste. Just to put the waste bags into perspective: The World Bank reports global municipal waste production as 1.3 billion tonnes a year in 2012 and predicts 2.2 billion tonnes a year for 2025. How do I explain it to my child? Each year, we take away 1.3 billion tonnes of material from our planet and deposit them into landfills, which form a parallel planet. This parallel planet differs from the main planet in that it is not a living planet. It has no metabolism. It is an eternal sink of material. How many generations will it take for the parallel planet to do away with the resources that sustain life on the main planet? If the answer frightens you, enroll in the residue world cup!