However you look at it, waste is big. Really big in economic, social and environmental terms. Although it may not make the headlines in WA very often, the question of how we prevent waste is fast becoming one of the world’s the most important challenges.
Here is Australia we have made some progress but we have much more to do. For example, we currently dump around 700kg of waste per person to landfill each year making us third worst in the world (New Zealand’s rate is almost half that). No one knows for sure how much we waste in Australia overall, but several studies show that it would be in the tens of billions of dollars. For example, a nation, what we waste on personal unused goods is more than we spend on roads, universities and medicines put together.
Rethink your bottom line
At work, most of our waste is hidden away where we don’t notice it, in habits and procedures we do without thinking.
A Victorian study showed that the hidden costs of waste for most businesses were 5 to 10 times higher than the waste disposal costs.
The fact that these costs are not usually ‘seen’ by conventional accounting can make it hard to make waste prevention seem worthwhile. But, wherever you look in the world, the businesses that do work on waste prevention typically perform much better in both the short and long term.
Hidden costs can include;
- Lost revenue by not recycling
- Lost opportunities for secondary income generation or cost recovery
- Costs of raw materials in the waste product
- Rejects to suppliers
- Depreciation (wear and tear) of processing equipment generating waste product
- Depreciation of waste management equipment
- Energy used in the production of the waste
- Water used in waste production and cleaning
- Materials inventory and warehousing costs
- Waste storage space costs
- Loss of staff time
- Labour, operating and maintenance costs associated with waste management activities
- Occupational health and safety equipment and training
- Compliance and monitoring costs
- Potential environmental liability costs
- Reduced morale, motivation and pride in work standards
Source: This material is based on publications by the Australia Institute, Victoria’s Ecorecycle project and others.
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