The increasing amount of daily waste has become a pressing issue in many countries. In my view, although there are several reasons why this is happening, the most prominent ones are the increase in production lines, and inefficiencies in national waste management structures. To solve this, I suggest allowing innovative private startups to offer solutions to adequately enhance efficiency.
The increase in demand leads companies to expand their production lines. Although this can be a valid response to increasing market demand, it is a major contributor to the skyrocketing waste amount. For instance, nowadays in our tech-driven world, people tend to possess high-tech devices. This means they would no longer keep their smartphones for longer times compared to the past. Consequently, their old devices become unusable and so are categorized as waste. This means the quicker people replace their electronic devices, the more waste they generate.
Another significant cause is the inefficiencies of countries’ waste management systems. Current structures are neither cost-efficient nor capable of handling massive volume of garbage. For example, electronic manufacturers like Apple, have plans to promote sustainability in the process of replacing their consumers’ old devices with new ones. By implementing this, they can effectively acquire a person’s old device, subtracting the value of that from the new device’s price, and selling the new device in a cheaper way. In this way, the manufacturer would accept the responsibility of handling electronic waste. However, people often neglect sustainability and assume they can sell their devices for higher values compared to what the company offers. As a result, such assumptions along with the gap between their mindset and market reality, disrupt recycling process and leave unusable devices unrecycled.
To offer a feasible solution, governments and communities should reframe their waste management structures and encourage private startups to offer innovation-driven solutions. By allowing the private sector to make contributions in waste management, not only the responsibility can be fairly shared, but also more resources can be allocated specifically to this matter. For example, there might be startups collecting electronic waste, extracting reusable parts of that and reselling them cheaper to companies, while recycling the rest. By assessing the usability of different parts of a device, they can also be beneficial to the whole supply chain of a corporation.
To conclude, the ever-increasing volume of waste production is truly concerning, and some of the major causes of this are mass production and uncapable waste management resources and structures. To tackle these issues, companies and governments should be more serious in handling their responsibilities to promote sustainable ways of garbage management, and expanding their infrastructures.