| Teaser Text | The zero waste concept – that today’s waste is tomorrow’s raw material – has been recently embraced by a few relatively small countries, including New Zealand, Scotland and Wales. Whilst these countries are not world leaders in terms of their economic activity or manufacturing output, they are the first to publicly recognise the urgent need to move from our current one-way linear resource use and disposal culture to a “closed-loop” circular system modelled on nature’s successful strategies.
The term “zero waste” is perhaps a bit misleading in that it does not mean that wastes will not arise in society; the zero waste approach envisions a “second industrial revolution”, with all industrial inputs being used in final products or converted into value-added inputs for other industries or processes. In this way, industries will be reorganised into clusters, such that each industry’s wastes/by-products are fully matched with the input requirements of another industry, and the integrated whole produces no waste. |
