Landfill waste

One of the troubling aspects of the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certification program is that is applied only to complete buildings, in conjunction with their sites and site development. This fact makes it non-scalable and non-incremental. That is, someone wanting to design a green kitchen or bath or house addition cannot readily glean any guidance from LEED.

In Taiwan 3M reformulated its carrier tape to be made of 100% recycled material, reducing the facility's wastes by 120 tons the first year. In Germany and Japan, 3M facilities have eliminated all their landfill waste. The generation of waste was minimized through prevention, and the remaining waste is reused and recycled. Waste is incinerated only when reuse and recycling is not possible. This effort in Japan has resulted in an 83% reduction in total waste since the initiative began.

While many organizations have partially established the infrastructure needed to support telecommuting, including migrating enterprise applications and administrative functions to remotely accessible interfaces, a more thorough approach would take into consideration the full complement of enterprise and home office resource, application and access requirements along with the necessary data, voice and technical services needed to deliver a robust remote access experience.

In the meantime, many organizations are examining extending the benefits of telework to their entire organization to support business continuity in the event of a widespread pandemic or other natural or manmade disaster, as well as realizing enhanced productivity gains from extending the work environment.

Sustainability is a vague term that can be defined in many ways using several perspectives.

Essentially the principle of sustainability means that waste equals food in the sense that nutrients must be recycled in a system. Someone's waste is another persons food. This may seem extreme but it becomes realistic when you think about crossing social classes or human to animal boundaries.

The consumption of food and products is one of the greatest way humans can change how sustainable they are. There is no "away" in throwing garbage away. What we consume as people, waste, must be placed somewhere, whether that is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the local County waste facility or underground in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Human consumption waste includes old tires, uneaten food, food and product packaging, nuclear waste, and basically anything that you would toss into the garbage. There are three ways to get rid of waste: Landfills, recycling, and incineration. Recycling is one way to combat the great amounts of waste humans produce. Recycling is not enough and does not solve the waste problem. Humans must consume less to produce less waste.