Handling and management of waste with recyclable characteristics

Global phenomena such as population growth, the growing trend towards urbanization, economic growth and clearly unsustainable production and consumption patterns linked to a linear economy have generated a constant increase in waste generation. These characteristics are present in the Latin American and Caribbean region, where approximately 80% of the population is urban. According to the studies carried out, the inevitable consequence of the aforementioned characteristics projects an exponential increase in waste generation in the region of more than 60% by 2025 (World Bank, 2012).

Environmentalists try to warn about the consequences of a linear economy that began with the first Industrial Revolution and that can be summarized in the notion of take-make-throw away, that is, extracting natural resources to use them in the processes of production and distribution of goods, whose waste must be disposed of. The result: a society oriented to generate waste. However, towards the end of the 20th century, exponential industrial growth already began to show signs of scarcity of natural resources due to their excessive use and the consequent depletion of their reserves. The thinking presented and the data of reality lead to the consistent conclusion that this economic model is clearly not sustainable for a world of 7 billion inhabitants who aspire to obtain a higher standard of living, and even less for the 9 billion projected for 2050. In 2015, the population of Latin America and the Caribbean, in particular, was estimated at 630 million people, and the projection for 2025 amounts to 691 million (UNEP, 2016). The solution then is a paradigm shift with one goal: a society oriented towards generating resources. This is how the concept of circular economy, focused on reproducing the biological mechanism of nature by incorporating the idea of ​​an industrial metabolism based on thinking and designing products so that after a first use they can be reused or become a secondary raw material for a new industrial process or to generate alternative energy, thus displacing fossil fuels. In this way, a transition path begins where the fundamental objective is to leave aside the concept of final disposal of waste inherited from the linear economy to successively move on to adequate waste management until true management of resources as an integral part of a circular economy.