What counts as waste depends on who is holding it
One household's rubbish can be another person's raw material, and official definitions reflect that. In European Union law, something becomes waste once whoever holds it throws it away, plans to, or is legally obliged to. Under that logic, an invention that gives a discarded material any value at all can turn trash into a by-product overnight.
Other bodies phrase it differently. The 1989 Basel Convention on moving hazardous waste across borders focuses on disposal, including disposal required by national law. The United Nations statistics glossary describes materials that are not prime products and for which whoever generated them has no further use. Canada's government keeps it simple: any material, hazardous or not, with no further use.
The volumes are enormous. In 2018 the United States generated 292.4 million short tons of municipal waste, about 4.9 pounds per person per day. Roughly 69 million tons were recycled and 25 million composted. Textiles alone account for an estimated 11.3 million tons, and the average American discards 81.5 pounds of clothing a year. Construction and demolition debris, tracked separately, came to around 600 million tons, though much of it gets reused, like old asphalt milled into new paving mix. Electronics are a stubborn problem: of 2.37 million tons of televisions, computers, phones and printers thrown out in 2009, only a quarter were recycled.
Some categories demand special handling. American law defines hazardous waste as material that can harm health or the environment, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act lets the Environmental Protection Agency oversee it from creation through transport, treatment and final disposal. Radioactive waste comes from power plants, hospitals, research centres and mines, and five federal agencies share responsibility for it. The country recognises five kinds, ranging from high-level waste out of reactors to mildly contaminated paper, bags and protective clothing, plus natural radioactive material concentrated by drilling or water treatment.
Even car airbags qualify. Their propellant can ignite and react, so an undeployed airbag stays dangerous; setting it off safely removes the hazard. A 2018 federal rule exempted dealerships, salvage yards and repair shops that install or remove airbags from the full regulations, while facilities collecting the spent units remain covered.
Source: Waste
