Environmental Benefits Of Recycling (eBook)

From the point of view of sustainable development, improving waste management is essential if society’s environmental impacts are to be reduced. Identifying waste management channels with lower environmental impacts is thus a key issue. The waste hierarchy illustrated in Figure 1 is often used as a rule of thumb followed by public policies.

However, a recurring theme in the debates that surround waste and resources management is the extent to which the recycling of materials offers genuine benefits to the environment. Often, critics of the policy drive towards greater recycling assert that the act of recycling may in fact have little or no benefit to the environment, suggesting that more energy may be used in getting materials to the recycling facility than is saved by the process of recycling.

In order to compare waste management routes in environmental terms, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is currently seen as the best approach to use. The strength of LCA is that the methodology allows comparison of two or more different products or processes by quantifying the service given by the products or processes.

Language ‏ : ‎ English
Type  :  eBook (PDF)