The Waste Reduction Accord of the UN Environmental Accords includes Zero Waste, Extended Producer Responsibility, and Consumer Responsibility.

Our society is extremely wasteful. Only 1% of the products we buy are still in use 6 months after purchase. And while the municipal waste stream is enormous (more than 250 million tons a year nationwide), it is dwarfed by the amount of waste created to produce products in the first place.  70% of all product related waste is created before products even reach consumers. Despite local governments’ extraordinary recycling efforts, resulting in a 58% diversion rate in California, we nevertheless still landfill about the same amount of waste in 2009 as we did in 1990 – 40 million tons. 

The enormous volume of waste has significant climate impact. And not all waste has equal climate impact.  Methane, which comes from decomposing organic material like food, for example, has 72 times the climate impact of carbon dioxide over a 20 year period. Studies have shown that waste reduction can achieve 7% of the greenhouse gas emission reductions needed to put us on the path to stabilize the climate by 2050.

Local governments can make progress in this area by adopting Zero Waste ordinances based on the principles of reduce, reuse, recycle; setting up organics collection and composting programs, and adopting Extended Producer Responsibility ordinances (see http://www.calpsc.org/policies).