@Wordsmith
Sreeja V
@Wordsmith · 1:53

Which are the top 5 countries that lead in waste management?

article image placeholderglobalwastegeneration.jpg
Hi, everyone. Happy Monday morning. I was helping my son with a project over the weekend and it had to do with the environment. A ten year old was getting introduced to the dark realities of wood. What this planet is bracing with day after day, and I think the hope was that the implications of this on human life will probably motivate him and his classmates to stay conscious of every bit of waste that they generate day in and day out. He's already a fast track consumer

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jGOrlvYvr1-5hsB2IuxlnMOtXyZV0AQT/view?usp=sharing

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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 1:17
Hi wordsmith. Thank you for this wonderful topic without Googling. Let me try to name the five countries. I'm just pulling this out unaware. Let's see Japan, Finland, New Zealand and Germany. Most of these countries have made the list on my guess because of generally their attitude towards the environment and how serious they take it generally in their population as well as their governments. New Zealand because I guess the new government is probably one of the most ideal progressive governments out there
@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 0:43
Birdsmith. This is an absolutely wonderful swell and question. While I would agree with much of what Shammi said, I would just like to add Germany in the mix because I think think I remember vaguely reading about a year ago that they managed to create electricity from their waste. If I remember this right. And so they were using a lot of their waste and recycling to create energy
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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 0:25
Hey, Sudha, I think you've missed Germany in my original list, but regardless, I was very amused that they are taking waste matter and converting it to energy. That's almost along the lines of Einstein, energy is neither created or destroyed. They're converting matter into waste matter into energy. Good for them, good for us. If everybody else follows that
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@shammi
Shammi Mohamed
@shammi · 0:28
Also, just to piece my curiosity, I did go and Google the top countries for this and I was quite surprised. But anyways, I wanted to extend one more more question to this. Can anyone guess where the United States falls, which number it falls in the top recycling or top waste management countries
@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 0:50
So I'm going to just put a guess in there saying that we are somewhere in the hundreds amongst the 200 countries. I could be way off. But I'm just guessing in there
@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 2:05
Yeah, I'll go with the 80th, and I think I'm overshooting it. I think we're in the triple digits, but I would say 80. And as far as the five countries that I want to guess, I am going to say Japan. I'm going to say Russia. My trip to Moscow a couple of years ago, you could eat off the streets there. They're doing something. So I'm going to guess Moscow or Russia, Japan
@Swell
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15

Welcome to Swell!

@Wordsmith
Sreeja V
@Wordsmith · 5:00

https://bit.ly/3jCCwyx

Their policy focuses on material enhancement, which is recycling and energy valorization through incineration, which is basically creation of energy which is recovered in the form of electricity and heat. And this is used to heat up buildings from this incineration process. They also have one additional treatment for the byproduct that comes out of this process and they recover metals, et cetera that is present in that flag. And then the final product is taken to a landfill. Austria, which is at number three
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@Wordsmith
Sreeja V
@Wordsmith · 2:15

Would incineration be ideal? What would be the implications?

But the whole question of incineration being an eco friendly method of dealing with waste still looms large. It's still the elephant in the room. And those Sweden claims to be having some technology, which kind of washes the fumes that this particular plant generates, et cetera. We really don't know what the effects of that would be. So I look forward to your thoughts on that. And thank you for participating the painting
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@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 2:07

https://s.swell.life/SSCmEhS5ZA9LIef

And I think this kind of research in chemistry and in materials Sciences is needed in order to solve this problem that it is not just a problem of management, but really what we are looking at is a problem of and D, and it needs to be cracked at that level. I'm going to share this link for you to take a read. Thank you. Bye
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@Wordsmith
Sreeja V
@Wordsmith · 2:06

https://bit.ly/3d8YyGK

Hey, Sudha, thank you so much for this input. And I agree RND might just be the only way forward to tackle this problem. So we now have scientists also scoring garbage dumps in search of background bacteria that can eat plastic and save us the trouble of waste management. Germany has discovered a strain of bacteria known as Pseudomonas bacteria, and they noticed that it was attacking polyurethane. In 2016, Japanese scientists discovered a strain of bacteria called Idionella psychiatrist digest plastic made from polyethylenterephtylate that is pet
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