Hari Srinivas

Emerging lessons in waste management, as well as strategies adopted from industrial symbiosis and other fields, has provided us with a number of principles with which waste management policies can be developed.

Many of these principles are well known, but looked at from the perspective of a waste management policy, can provide valuable inspiration for developing an integrated approach aimed at resource efficiency and waste minimization.

A list of five principles, including examples of how they could influence waste management policies are presented below:

a. Prevention principle:

The cost of clean-up after waste can be formidably high and sometimes the damage to the environmental and people's health is irreversible. Preventing waste at source also has the co-benefits of improving efficiency in the use of resources and energy, needed for sustainable development especially for a country with limited resources per capita.

• Use of Design for Environment (DfE) approach to use less material and packaging in manufacturing
• Application of "Design for Disassembly" in order to better fecilitate recycling and reuse.
• Create new products from waste material outputs, or set up waste "exchanges" between industries

b. Polluter pay principle (PPP):

In the context of waste management, PPP can be reflected in full cost pricing of environmental and financial cost from production, distribution, use and disposal of goods and services.

• Increase the use of environmental accounting tools
• Institute material and product tracking systems by using blockchain technology
• Develop pollution monitoring packages using smart technologies and assessment tools.

c. Extended producer responsibility (EPR):

Producers have responsibility, either physical or financial, for environmental impacts of their products from production through to disposal as waste. EPR is also viewed as extension of pollution pay principle.

• Community- and consumer-based product assessments
• Regional coordination among national governments for environmental laws and regulations.
• Set up recycle, buyback and recycling programmes with industry associations

d. Life-cycle principle:

Products should be designed, produced, managed in such a way as to minimize the environmental impacts during the products entire life cycle of production and use, and to facilitate its reuse, recycling and final disposal.

• Awareness and training on the use and implementation of LCA tools
• Multistakeholder monitoring and evaluation systems to identify and act on impacts on the environment
• Supply chain awareness and coordination (including transparency and evaluation criteria)

e. Proximity principle:

Businesses and industry, as well as households need to deal with waste near to where it arises so as to reduce negative impacts from transportation, disposal, landfills, incineration and trans-boundary movement of wastes.

• Institute more 3R-related policies in households and businesses
• Broader availability of micro composting and other recycling technologies to consumers and businesses/industries
• Proper product labelling and instructions to enable dissembly and recycling