What is Zero Waste?

Zero Waste is an aspirational goal to achieve zero discharge, zero material waste, zero atmospheric damage.

The term comes from the Japanese industrial concept of total quality management. It is influenced by the idea of ‘zero defects’ in manufacturing. Zero Waste focuses on the whole lifecycle of products including production, design, waste reduction, reuse and recycling.

The need to steer a new course in the way that waste is generated and managed in South Australia has become ever more pressing. Our use of resources, from oil, gas, wood, and minerals to air and water, has escalated dramatically over the last hundred years. If we continue to degrade or over-use our environmental resources (natural capital) we will leave future generations with a serious and increasing environmental debt. In the past natural capital has been treated as superabundant whereas today the remaining natural capital appears to be both scarce and complementary and therefore limiting.

By disposing waste to landfill we bury many useful resources preventing ongoing use of the material(s) in one form or another. Although these materials can be remade, this requires large amounts of energy, and the consumption of more resources. The disposal of waste to landfill removes the potential to derive a higher resource value from the waste materials through re-use, recycling and resource recovery. Producing unnecessary waste means we are not using resources sustainably.