Re: (All) Waste Prevention Technology

[adam davis <adavis@hooked.net>]

Callahan, Mike wrote:
> 
> I'll throw in my two cents,
> 
> No technology "prevents" waste unless you limit your discussion to a
> specific waste you are trying to prevent.  Powder coatings eliminate
> solvent fumes and liquid wastes but they create dust and solid waste.
> Solvent coatings can be air dried while powder coatings must be heated
> to effect cure.  Powder coatings also require a much cleaner surface so
> that cleaning wastes may be greater.
> 
> Every change has its trade-offs of benefits and disadvantages.  If we
> could sum them all up and establish one numeric rating of "pollution",
> then we could determine if a given technology actually prevented
> pollution compared to another for a given unit of production.
> 
> Since there is no easy indicator, industry relys on the costs society
> places on each raw material and waste stream.  In Europe at the turn of
> the century, raw materials were scarce and labor was cheap.  That's why
> so many inventions focused on ways to save material.  In the US, the
> opposite was true.  Most inventions were labor saving devices because
> labor was scarce.
> 
> Given a certain set of raw material, labor, energy, and disposal costs,
> an engineer will seek out the optimum mix (i.e., the lowest cost per
> unit of production).  Many of the P2 successes we are now finding are
> not so much due to any new technology but are a response to changing
> constraints and costs.  As waste treatment and disposal costs increase,
> the optimum setting may allow for more usage of labor and/or energy to
> offset these increased costs.
> 
> Just a few thoughts,
> 
> Mike.callahan@jacobs.com

As for my two cents:

Your exactly right.  The artificially cheap inputs from subsidized
primary extractive industry send the price signal that material
throughput is cheap.  The "four horsemen" of primary extractive
industry, mining, petroleum, agriculture and forest products, send 
more and more material more and more quickly down the chute to
primary manufacturers.  (And quickly to landfills.)  This is the
imperative of GNP!  

On the other side of that "bridge to the 21st century" Clinton keeps
talking about, however, lies a world in which economic health can
no longer be a function of how quickly we can consume our natural
capital.  We need to focus attention on clearly attaching price
signals, and incentives, to replacing both mass and energy with
information and intelligence: thus P2!

Adam Davis
Waste Management, Inc.
adavis@hooked.net