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Waste

It is one of the basic laws of nature that any organism or any ecosystem cannot co-exist with its own waste. It must be recycled and used again. In today's world, this does not happen any longer. We bury, burn, hide, dump, and constantly produce waste.

As a rule of thumb, you can average out 1 kilo of human waste per person per day, and one kilo of general waste per person per year.

If you carry that out mathematically, there are over 4,000,000,000 people alive today, producing 8,000,000,000 kilos of waste daily. That is 240,000,000,000 tons per month of waste. About 60% of that is biodegradable (assuming adequate biological and chemical oxygen demand), but the sad truth is, a great deal of the waste remains just waste.

But waste does not remain waste long. It is often toxic in the environment, and a great deal of it produces CO and CO2 in huge quantities into the atmosphere. There are of course much worse toxic wastes being created by the use of fossil fuels.

The rising industrialization of countries like India and China are posing even great strains on our ecosystem that may be heading towards some kind of logical and physical limit. No organism or ecosystem can co-exist with its own waste.

In these pages you will be able to learn about what wastes are being produced, how they are managed (if they are at all), and what are the consequences to our planet by continuing to ignore the basic laws and principles.