The Total
Answer To
Waste
Management
Burden
he man who said there
were only two certainties in
life - death and taxes – got
it wrong. He forgot waste.
It’s an inevitability of pretty
well all human activity from domestic to
commercial, industrial to agricultural, on
the sea and even in space.
T
There’s just no escaping it – or the cost of
dealing with it. Indeed, this year’s latest
rise in the Landfill Tax means that it now
costs £84.40 to dispose of one tonne of
waste in one of the UK’s burdened landfill
sites.
Annual tax hikes, and other Government
efforts to boost industrial recycling and
materials reuse - including a raft of new
regulations - have been designed to
persuade companies to tighten up the
way they manage their waste. Waste
creation remains one of industry’s top
environmental impacts, and the pressure is
on to handle industrial by-products more
sustainably than in the past.
Once, of course, waste collection, storage
and disposal was a relatively simple
business fairly low down on a facilities
manager’s priorities and probably
regarded as no more than an inevitable
nuisance; an unwelcome intrusion.
Remember what it was like? The company
skips or yard area would be filled up with
a hotch-potch mixture of wastes and a
designated waste haulier would turn up
and take it away.
What happened to it then was of little
importance. It was gone and that’s all that
mattered. Its potential for pollution and
its value as an often reusable resource was
seldom considered.
But those days are gone and won’t be
coming back.
Now you must assess your waste according
to an official Hierarchy - a set of options for
managing waste in terms of what is best
Testing for water content in recovered oil at a CSG laboratory
for the environment (with disposal right at
the bottom) –
• Prevention
• Re-use
• Recycling
• Recovery
• Disposal
This, in turn, is presenting specialist waste
management companies with new waste
treatment challenges, inspiring them to