No such thing as waste

No such thing as garbage

There is no such thing as garbage - only wasted resources.

All carbon based waste is a potential source of energy, through biogas, waste to oil, or turning it into burning briquettes to burn in an efficient cooker/heater.

Sewage is a source of nutrients, and treating it as merely a disposal problem misses an important opportunity. After the energy is extracted with a biogas digester, the sludge can be used (with suitable precautions) in agriculture. Composting toilets are another solution, which produce a greater bulk of rich compost compared to the biogas digester, but do not produce energy.

Municipal waste is typically a mess of all kinds of resources:

• food waste that can be composted. This requires education (starting in schools) and a cultural shift.
• paper, plastic, glass and metal that can be recycled
• miscellaneous items, e.g. items soiled with food.^[1]
  • In future it may be practical to use paper and plastic items soiled with food in a waste to energy (SWERF? "ENE" - renewable energy developments?)
  • In future we can expect this - indeed, most plastics - to be replaced by bioplastics which can be more safely recycled, composted or used in a waste to energy process.

• • plastics of the wrong type which cannot be recycled - there are processes for converting such materials into second-grade material to make useful products.