Waste accounts for approximately 5 percent of Aotearoa’s emissions. Waste management provides opportunities and challenges across mitigation, adaptation, and transition – through rethinking the way we utilise and discard resources.
Circular Economy - Sustainable Materials Management
This course looks at where materials come from and how we can ensure they are used more efficiently, for longer, and can then be reused. This is the aim of the Circular Economy – the result of choices and strategies by suppliers, designers, businesses, policymakers and all of us as consumers.
A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism
In this course, the consequences of metal production are explored, as well as opportunities to move towards a more sustainable metal production system. It focuses on the options to reach a circular economy for metals: keeping metals in use for a very long time, to avoid having to mine new ones.
Climate Change is a Waste Management Problem
Carbon dioxide is a waste product; dumping it into the open air is a form of littering. This article explores climate change from a different perspective, and a different type of solution, arguing that keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is a waste management problem.
Read Klaus Lackner and Christophe Jospe’s article Climate Change is a Waste Management Problem
Climate Change Impacts of Electricity Generated at a Waste-to-Energy Facility
A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment of a waste-to-energy (WTE) facility in Jamesville, New York was undertaken to understand the life cycle climate change impact as an electricity generator. The results from this analysis disagree with claims in the reviewed literature that WTE can avoid GHG emissions overall, although avoided emissions reduce the magnitude of its impact.
Waste management strategies to mitigate the effects of fluorinated greenhouse gases on climate change
Fluorinated greenhouse gases (F-gases) utilisation (in refrigeration and air conditioning) has increased drastically over the last few decades, with serious consequences for global warming. This critical review aims at providing a revision of the current F-gas management problems and strategies and provides an overview of the innovative strategies that can be applied to contribute to build a sustainable market under circular economy principles.
