WASTE MANAGEMENT: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Waste has been an omnipresent aspect of human life. We have been generating waste ever since our appearance on the Earth, are doing so now, and will continue to do so in the future. However, the quantity and composition of waste kept on changing with evolving human civilization and increasing population. The advent of Agricultural, Industrial, and Digital revolutions, notably the latter two, drastically altered the nature of societal waste from simple, biodegradable, and short-lived to complex, non-biodegradable, and persistent. Population growth from less than 1 billion at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to about 7.5 billion by 2016, combined with widespread industrial application of 1000s of synthetic chemicals, led to introduction of numerous toxic and ‘forever’ chemicals in the environment, causing widespread pollution with serious consequence to human and ecological health. The global solid waste quantity, estimated at 2.01 billion metric tons (BMT) in 2016 is projected to go up to 3.40 BMT by 2050. The growing quantity of waste, along with the ever-increasing human population, has challenged governments and policy makers globally to find a cost-effective, environmentally safe, and sustainable solution to the burgeoning waste problem. The presentation offers a review of waste through human history, efforts to manage it properly, and discusses the exemplary cooperation between a public agency and a private sector organization in the United States that led to development of the modern sanitary landfill method of municipal solid waste disposal and resulted in establishment of the applied discipline of waste science. Current global status of waste issues and the shift in waste management philosophy from considering waste as useless, discarded material to valuable untapped resource is examined, along with future use of innovative technologies for sustainable waste management.