Proposal to Reduce Waste Pollution and Promote Efficient Waste Materials Lifecycle Management through Employment Programs and Recycling Infrastructure Investment

Authors

Jake Gibson, Wright State University - Main Campus

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2021

Abstract

This proposal seeks to promote more efficient uses of materials by the consumer products industry while simultaneously restoring natural areas and ecological processes through a jobs guarantee program whose efforts will return discarded materials into a more efficient consumer product lifecycle. The proposal consists of two prongs: a jobs guarantee program providing jobs collecting discarded materials from natural areas, sorting high value materials from collected waste streams, and operating recycling equipment during collection and at collection and processing centers; and investments in national recycling infrastructure, namely industrial equipment to be installed at collection and processing centers such as balers, shredders, conveyors, shears, and other large machinery to assist in and enable the salvaging process. Such a program ensures the more efficient use of resources, as viable salvaged materials are re-created by subsidized recycling processes and sent to market at a cheap price reflecting this subsidization; this low price mirrors that granted to materials extracted via traditional methods and the myriad subsidies granted that industry over the centuries. Thanks to these low prices, recycled materials can gain a cost advantage over the incorrectly priced virgin materials extracted from natural processes and thus be recycled into industrial processes, bypassing the need for some further extraction and energy inputs and reducing the rate at which landfill space is consumed. Additional benefits from such a program can materialize in the form of better waste collection and sorting at the consumer source points of generation, incentivizing practices such as composting and the collection of organic waste for more energy efficient incineration as biofuel, a money-saving practice for which examples already exist in many European countries. This paper will detail the problems addressed by such a program in the local Southwest Ohio region by first analyzing the state of the problem of waste pollution in the surrounding area and its constituent causes before detailing the myriad ways in which this two-pronged solution proposal stands to relieve the pressure waste places on local natural ecologies and the broader social communities residing alongside and within them. This paper will conclude upon analyzing potential problems that could be faced in the implementation of such a contextually radical program of community-based resource stewardship.

Is Part Of

Student Papers in Local and Global Regional Economies

Repository Citation

Gibson, J. (2021). Proposal to Reduce Waste Pollution and Promote Efficient Waste Materials Lifecycle Management through Employment Programs and Recycling Infrastructure Investment. .
https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/econ_student_papers_economies/24