Waste is what? Classification

Mankind has long gone beyond the biological species that peacefully exists in the Earth's biosphere. The modern version of civilization intensively and in many ways thoughtlessly exploits the resources of our planet - minerals, soil, flora and fauna, water and air. Everything that hands reach, humanity is being transformed to the growing needs of our technocratic society. This leads not only to depletion of the planet's resources, but also to the creation of a huge amount of waste of a very different nature.

What is waste in general? Are they a problem for us?

If we simplify and generalize, then waste is the result of the everyday and industrial activities of mankind, which is harmful to the environment. These include any technocratic objects or parts of them that have lost value and are no longer used in everyday life, at work or in any other human activity. Today there is a situation when the Earth has the potential to literally drown in the products of its own vital activity, unless very serious and urgent measures are taken.

In order to imagine the scale of the issue, one fact is enough: in some countries, one inhabitant of a megacity produces a year before a ton of household waste. Tons! Fortunately, some of this garbage is recycled, but most of it settles on giant landfills, which are accumulated by a significant part of the major cities of the world. For example, around Moscow 800 hectares of planned landfills. And probably tens of times more spontaneous - in the ravines, on the banks of rivers and streams, along the roadsides.

And now imagine a large combine - metallurgical, textile, chemical - this is not so important. Wastes of such production are also measured in tons, but not in a year, but in a day. You just imagine this dirty, poisoned stream gathering from a metallurgical plant in Siberia and a chemical plant somewhere in Pakistan, automobile production in Korea and a paper factory in China. Waste is a problem? Of course, and very serious.

History of waste

Before the advent of synthetic waste materials, for the most part, there was no. A broken ax, a worn out and discarded shirt, a drowned rook and even a forgotten castle, moss-covered castle, although they were products of human activity, but no harm was done to the planet - the organics were processed, the inorganic quietly and peacefully went underground, waiting for enthusiastic archaeologists.

Perhaps the first "real" household waste is glass, but at first it was produced in scant amounts. Well, the first serious industrial waste appears at the turn of the 18-19th centuries, with the advent of machine-type factories. Since then, their number has been increasing in an avalanche manner. If the factory of the 19th century just threw into the atmosphere products of burning coal, industrial giants of the century 21 pour millions of liters of highly toxic waste into rivers, lakes and oceans, turning them into "mass graves".

A truly "revolutionary" breakthrough in increasing the number of household and industrial waste occurred in the first third of the 20th century, with the beginning of the widespread use of oil and petroleum products and in the future - plastic.

What are the wastes: the classification

People in recent decades have produced such an exorbitant amount of waste that they can be safely divided into groups: food waste and paper waste, glass and plastic, medical and metallurgical, wood and rubber, radioactive and many others.

Of course, they are all unequal in their negative impact on the environment. For a more visual representation, we divide all waste into several groups according to the degree of contamination.

So, what waste is "good" and which are "bad"?

"Light" waste

1. Paper . This includes old newspapers, books, leaflets, stickers, paper sleeves and cardboard, glossy magazines and everything else. Recycling and recycling of waste paper is one of the simplest - most of them are so-called waste paper and then again turns into newspapers, magazines and cardboard boxes. Even dumped paper waste will be disintegrated in a short time (with respect to some other species), without causing any significant harm to the nature, in addition to the dye that comes into the soil and water from printed pages. Glossy paper is the most difficult for natural decomposition, and the simplest one is untreated and friable.
2. Food . All organic waste from kitchens, restaurants, hotels, private farms, agroholdings and food factories - everything that was "underfed" by a person. Food waste also decomposes quickly, even if we consider that in recent decades, food has less natural components and more chemistry. It is precisely it that is harmful to nature - for example, antibiotics, widely used in the cultivation of livestock, chemical substances that increase the shelf life and presentation of food products. A special place is occupied by GMO-substances and preservatives. GMOs, genetically modified foods, are the subject of heated debate among their opponents and supporters. Preservatives are blockers of the natural decomposition of organic matter - in a large number they turn it off from the natural cycle of decomposition and creation.
3. Glass . Glass and its various fractions are probably the oldest kind of "artificial waste". On the one hand, they are inert, and do not emit anything into the environment, do not poison air and water. On the other hand, with a sufficiently large amount of glass destroys natural biotopes - communities of living organisms. For example, you can bring animals that get wounds and die without mechanisms of protection from ubiquitous scattered fragments - and that's not speaking of inconvenience for the people themselves. The time of decomposition of glass is about a thousand years. Our distant descendants will already conquer distant galaxies, and the bottles thrown out today in the garbage canal will still invariably lie in the ground. The location of waste glass is not a problem of primary importance, and therefore their number increases every year.

Waste of "medium gravity"

1. Plastic . The amount of plastic waste to date is simply amazing - a simple listing of its types would take a couple of pages. It will not be a big exaggeration to say that today almost everything is made of plastic - packaging and household appliances, bottles and clothes, equipment and cars, dishes and yachts. Decomposes plastic twice as fast as glass - only 500 years. But unlike him, he almost always releases into the environment poisonous substances. Also, some of the properties of plastic make it an "ideal killer." Few know that in the world's oceans there have appeared whole "islands" of bottles, bottles, packages and other "profile" garbage brought by currents. They destroy millions of marine organisms. For example, seabirds are not able to distinguish plastic fragments from food, and naturally perish from clogging of the body. Waste plastic consumption is one of the most serious environmental problems to date.
2. Metallurgical waste, unrefined petroleum products, part of chemical waste, construction and part of car wastes (including old tires). All this pollutes the environment quite strongly (especially if we imagine the scale), but decompose relatively quickly - within 30-50 years.

The most "heavy" waste

1. Wastes containing mercury. Broken thermometers and lamps, some other devices. All of us remember that a broken mercury thermometer became a source of serious tension - the children were immediately expelled from the "contaminated" premises, and adults carefully collected "balls" of liquid metal "rolling" on the floor. The extreme toxicity of mercury is equally dangerous both for humans and for the soil - every year tens of tons of this substance are simply thrown away, causing irreparable harm to nature. This is why mercury has been assigned the first (highest) hazard class - special points are being set up to receive waste containing mercury, and containers with this hazardous substance are placed in sealed containers, labeled and stored until better times when they can be safely disposed of - From mercury is very inefficient.
2. Accumulators . Batteries, household, industrial and automotive batteries contain not only lead, but also sulfuric acid, as well as a host of other toxic substances, which causes serious damage to the environment. One ordinary battery, which you got from a television remote and thrown out in the street, will poison dozens of square meters of soil. In recent years in many large cities there have been mobile reception points of used household batteries and batteries, which indicates the high danger posed by such wastes.
3. Radioactive waste. The most dangerous waste is death and destruction in its pure form. Radioactive waste in sufficient concentration destroys all living things even without direct contact. Of course, no one will throw spent uranium rods into a dump - placing and recycling waste from "heavy metals" is a very serious process. For low-level and medium-level waste (having a relatively short half-life), different containers are used, in which the exhausted elements are poured with cement mortar or bitumen. After the expiration of the half-life, such waste can be disposed of as ordinary garbage. High-level waste is also recycled for recycling using a complex and expensive technology. Complete recycling of the waste of highly active "dirty metals", at the current level of technology development, is impossible, and they, placed in special containers, are stored for a very long time - for example, the half-life of uranium-234 is about one hundred thousand years!

Attitude to the problem of waste in the modern world

In the 21st century, the problem of environmental pollution with waste is one of the most acute and ambiguous. The attitude of the governments of different countries is also different. In many Western countries, the problem of waste management and recycling is given paramount importance - the separation of household garbage with subsequent safe processing, hundreds of recycling plants, special protected areas for the disposal of particularly hazardous and toxic substances. Recently, a number of countries have pursued a policy of "wasteless economy" - a system in which the recycling of waste will be 100%. The most distant on this road were Denmark, Japan, Sweden, Scotland and Holland.

In the third world countries there is no financial and organizational resources for systematic processing and utilization of wastes. As a result, there are huge landfills where municipal waste, under the influence of rains, sun and winds, emits extremely toxic fumes, poisoning everything around for tens of kilometers. In Brazil, Mexico, India, and African countries, hundreds of hectares of dangerous debris are surrounded by multimillion-dollar megacities, which are replenished daily by their new "supplies" with new and new wastes.

All ways to get rid of garbage

1. Removal of waste to landfills. The most common way of recycling garbage. In fact, garbage is simply removed from the eyes, thrown out the threshold. Some garbage dumps are temporary storage before recycling in a garbage factory, and some, especially in third world countries, only grow in size.
2. Export to the landfill of sorted rubbish. Such garbage is much more "civilized". Its processing is much cheaper and much more effective. Almost all countries of Western Europe have switched to a system of separate garbage, and for the ejection of a "diversified" package of household waste, very serious fines are envisaged.
3. Incineration plants. At such plants, waste is destroyed by high temperatures. Depending on the type of garbage and financial possibilities, different technologies are used.
4. Incineration of garbage with energy. Now, more and more processing plants are switching to energy recovery from garbage - for example, in Sweden, "garbage energy" provides 20% of the country's needs. The world begins to understand that waste is money.
5. Recycling. Much of the garbage can be recycled and re-used. It is to the maximum degree of wastelessness that the developed countries now seek. The simplest in processing are paper, wood and food waste.
6. Preservation and storage. This method is used for the most dangerous and toxic waste - mercury, radioactive, battery.

The situation with recycling and processing of garbage in Russia

Russia in this issue is considerably behind the developed countries of the world. Complicating factors at the same time are large areas, a significant number of obsolete enterprises, the state of the Russian economy, and, what's wrong, the domestic mentality, which is best described by a popular expression about the extreme residential structure and reluctance to know about the problems of neighbors.

Who should be equal

Sweden has reached such a level of processing and recycling that it does not have enough! Swedes are even helped in this case by the Norwegians, for a certain bribe dealing with their domestic and industrial waste.

The Japanese also surprise their neighbors - in the Land of the Rising Sun 98% of the metal is used again. Moreover, recently Japanese scientists discovered bacteria that eat plastic! By careful estimations, these microorganisms in the future can become the main way of utilization of polyethylene.