If you live in a house, apartment or similar abode, you produce waste. Right? You probably can't go a week without producing waste. All kinds of waste. Call it trash if you want. It's still waste. And if you don't live where recycling is mandatory or there is no outlet for your voluntary environmental tendencies, everything goes into the trash - bottles, cans, cardboard, plastics, bottle caps, paint cans, light bulbs, fluorescent lamps, camera and flashlight batteries, pesticide bottles, pressurized spray cans, aluminum foil, used oil, greasy rags - you name it. It's an easy life, isn't it! You've even tried to make a "two pointer" at one time or another, gracefully aiming a piece of waste in a beautiful arc toward your trash can and congratulating yourself if it went in.
Ahh, but it's not so easy if you're an industry. If you're an industry, you've got rules that declare that not all waste is created equal.
The government has declared that there are six kinds of waste: construction/demolition, hazardous, special, industrial/residual, municipal, and universal. With this list you begin to see that tossing all waste into one waste bucket isn't possible.
- Construction and demolition waste includes bricks, concrete, roofing materials, framing lumber, cement blocks, dirt and similar materials associated with construction.
- Municipal waste includes such innocuous materials as your lunch bag, the little box your french fries came in, the wrapper from your tummy pills, cloth, the paper from the bottom of your bird cage, beat up old pieces of wood, and so on.
- Hazardous waste includes a collection of items the government says is harmful to people and the environment. There are two kinds of hazardous wastes, "characteristic" and "listed."
- "Characteristic" hazardous wastes include four categories:
- Ignitable waste refers to wastes that ignite easily and have a flashpoint under 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Corrosive waste involves chemicals that eat their way through containers and skin if you get it on yourself.
- Reactive wastes are those that explode or react violently with water or generate toxic gases.
- Toxic wastes can poison groundwater and streams
- Corrosive waste involves chemicals that eat their way through containers and skin if you get it on yourself.
- "Listed" hazardous wastes include a special set of materials such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and PCB-containing oils, asbestos, hospital wastes that have to be disposed of by burning by and at approved facilities,
- Industrial or residual waste includes waste from industrial processes that isn't a product or co-product: mill wastes, wood wastes, greases and waste water.
- Universal wastes include fluorescent lamps, mercury-containing switches and thermometers, sodium lamps, NiCad batteries and unused pesticides and herbicides.
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