A4.12 Waste Reduction
On average, each person in the UK throws away seven times their body weight (about 500kg) in rubbish every year.
All organisations produce waste and therefore all organisations are engaged in waste management of some sort. The principles of waste management are Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, which forms the basis of the waste hierarchy. The Waste Hierarchy is discussed in more detail in Section 2.3.
Waste management has a number of associated environmental impacts. For example, there is the transport required to move waste; noise, dust and odour created by waste management activities; leachate of hazardous materials from landfill and air emissions from incineration. The less waste produced, the lesser these impacts.