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In Swaziland we are wasting a huge opportunity for saving resources and earning money!  Call it what you want: waste, rubbish or 'tibi' - everyday we throw valuable resources away unnecessarily.

Over the next few weeks we will be talking rubbish in this column!  We will discuss the opportunities which are missed when we throw away rubbish; we will highlight the serious environmental and human impacts of waste; we will look at how waste has a role in today’s problems of HIV/AIDS and poverty; and we will suggest what everyone of us can do, either as an individual or a business, about the waste mountain.

What is waste and why does it matter?

Waste is what people throw away because they no longer need it or want it. Almost everything we do creates waste and as a society we are currently producing more waste than ever before.  We do this at home and at work.  The fact that we produce waste, and get rid of it, matters for the following reasons:

• When something is thrown away we lose the natural resources, the energy and the time which have been used to make the product.  The vast majority of resources that we use in manufacturing products cannot be replaced.  The use of these resources cannot go on indefinitely - we will run out!

• When something is thrown away we are putting pressure on the environment's ability to cope - in terms of the additional environmental impacts associated with extracting the new resources, manufacturing and distributing the goods, and in terms of the environmental impacts associated with getting rid of our rubbish.

• When something is thrown away we are failing to see it as a resource.  It is well understood that what is waste to one person may not be viewed as waste by another.  A good example of this is scrap metal which has been recycled for many years.  Increasingly people are realising that it makes economic sense as well as environmental sense to use "waste" rather than just throw it away.

The way in which we consume materials will affect whether we have a sustainable society that leaves resources available for future generations to use.  As consumers and producers, we are central to the concept of sustainability.  We need to think about how we can use fewer resources ("get more out of less"), how we can make products last for longer (which means we use less and we throw away less) and how we can do better things with our so-called "waste" than throw it away.  We need to see "waste" as a "resource".

The "Waste Hierarchy"
The best way of managing our waste is not to produce it in the first place - waste prevention.  After that we can think about reducing the amount of waste we do produce.  Then there may be an option to reuse the material.  The Swazi Government has adopted this approach to derive a hierarchy of options for managing waste - known as "the waste hierarchy".

The waste hierarchy specifies the following order of preference for dealing with our wastes - with those towards the top of the list more desirable than those towards the bottom:

• Reduce 
• Reuse 
• Recycle
• Disposal 

Watch this column for more articles on waste and sustainable development in Swaziland.

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