Want to Achieve Net Zero? Don’t Forget to Decarbonize Waste
Production and use of goods such as food, packaging and consumer products produces roughly 42% of all greenhouse gas. GHG emissions are produced annually during the mining and manufacturing process. Millions of acres of land are constantly being destroyed in search of minerals or for agriculture in order to supply the demand of our increasing rate of production and needed to feed our fast unsustainable consumerism behaviour. Often when these mines are no longer profitable, these large mining companies abandon the land and move on to their next pursuit.
In 2020 alone, 1.3 Billion tons of edible food was wasted. This food often ends up in landfills which ends up decomposing in the absence of oxygen, releasing methane which has a 100-year global warming potential 28-34 times that of CO2 and makes up 6% of all annual GHG emissions. Annually only of the products disposed of globally only 1% of that is recycled.
We currently live in a linear economy where we just produce-use-dump. This type of behaviour entrenched in us has been detrimental to our planet for two reasons:
The amount of energy, water and minerals needed to produce these products that are hardly ever taken into account, known as total accounting. This process also results in serious pollution. Consumers are not truly paying for all the resources that are needed to produce these products decreasing the actual value of these goods. The amount of GHGs produced and released into the atmosphere through the production and manufacturing process is not taken into account by the average consumer.
1740 MtCO2-eq (rounded) emissions accounting for 5% of total GHG emissions was released from landfills in 2020 where 2.02 billion tonnes of municipal waste are generated every year and disposed of globally annually.
Back in 2019, the Minister of Environment, Forestry and Tourism in Namibia, Mr Pohamba Shifeta stated that local authorities need to tackle the lack of human capital and capacity in the management of waste in their towns and there needs to be greater investment in technology that will increase the efficiency in which waste is handled. He further stated this year at the celebration of world clean up day on the 18th of September 2021 that Namibia was failing to manage its waste, and this was becoming a threat to the environment and the health of residents living in the areas where there was a lack of waste management.
Very little of Namibia’s waste is actually collected and disposed of in landfill thus polluting our environment. Namibia needs to enforce better collection and sorting measures to make sure waste can be recycled or at least is stored at a designated site.
Waste collectors who call themselves “rubbish dump entrepreneurs” are often told to leave dumpsites but this could be a real income generating industry if studied and managed properly. If wasted was collected and sorted properly these people could easily access these good and use it to turn it into value added products.
There needs to be a push to place importance and prioritization of allocating finances and better law enforcement to facilitate the effective implementation and monitoring of effective waste management strategies outline in the national waste management strategy.
Products need to be produced in such a way to recover the raw materials, which means are use of materials could be infinite. Through implementing effective and efficient waste management and recycling solutions around the world it is estimated that GHG emissions can be reduced by between 2.1 and 2.8 billion tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050, around 5% of global GHG emissions.
Readings:
https://www.wri.org/insights/net-zero-ghg-emissions-questionsanswered https://www.torontoenvironment.org/zerowaste_benefits https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg3chapter10-1.pdf https://www.namibian.com.na/191429/archive-read/Elevendumpsites-approved#close https://www.namibian.com.na/105452/read/Namibians-toleratelittering-%E2%80%93-Shifeta https://www.namibian.com.na/213762/archive-read/Walvis-Bayto-evict-garbage-pickers https://www.eunomia.co.uk/reports-tools/waste-in-the-net-zerocentury-how-better-waste-management-practices-can-contributeto-reducing-global-carbon-emissions/