ABSTRACT
Waste is big business. Every day the average person living in the US throws away 4.6 pounds of solid waste (Center for Sustainable Systems Factsheets 2008, 1), and for every pound of household waste we discard, 40 to 70 additional pounds of industrial debris were generated during its production (Rogers 2005, 4).1 But as one of Barry Commoner’s “four laws of ecology” makes clear: “Everything must go somewhere. There is no ‘waste’ in nature and there is no ‘away’ to which things can be thrown” (Commoner 1971).
