When people hear the term ‘zero waste’ for the first time, the common response is to think that it sounds
unrealistic. Zero waste however is not so much about a goal as about a philosophy that says waste
is never a good thing, so rather than just accept waste as inevitable - let’s work towards minimising
it. Zero waste is similar to the ideals of ‘zero accidents’ at work or ‘zero defects’ in manufacturing.
Zero waste is a ‘whole system’ approach that requires a rethinking of how materials flow through our
society, and a redesign of those systems to minimise material requirements and maximise material use.
Its main principles are known as the waste management hierarchy, or the 5 Rs of waste management
- Reduce waste, Reuse items, Recycle and Recover materials, and Residual disposal in a landfill as the
last option1. Zero waste takes Nature as its starting point, where there is no waste, because what
represents a surplus to one part of a system inevitably becomes food or fuel for another part of the
system. Zero waste envisages a society where material is constantly cycled through different systems,
adding value at each point of the cycle. Hence, a zero waste approach aims to ‘design out’ waste from
the system. It is not just about managing waste that is created, but about continuously seeking to
improve the management of material flows so that eventually there are no materials used in an event
that do not have further beneficial use.