ZERO WASTE DECLARATION
Zero Waste International Alliance, 2020
The first Earth Day was 50 years ago. Recycling, its natural industrial child, was envisioned to complete the resource circle, save the wilderness, generate jobs, and build the back end of the GNP all at once.
Now, in 2020, we are ready to establish a collective goal of:
“Zero Waste: the conservation of all resources by means of responsible production, consumption, reuse, and recovery of products, packaging, and materials without burning and with no discharges to land, water, or air that threaten the environment or human health.” ZWIA, updated 2018
This Zero Waste World can be founded on environmental and social justice principles that help create vibrant communities in harmony with nature:
Redesign: Manufacturers can redesign products for highest and best use focusing in on reuse, repair and composting with recycling as a final option.
Ban Wasteful Products: We can ban products that require wasting to compel redesign for durability, repair, composting and recycling.
Source Separation: We could collect all discarded materials and products separated at the source and further sort them into higher quality fractions for reuse, recycling, or composting, with nothing left out and nothing left over.
Resource Recovery Parks: We can build a new worldwide network of resource recovery parks to handle all discards as refined resources.
Advocate: Use our power as advocates and professionals to show what is possible and help policymakers avoid mistakes in meeting the goals that we help them envision.
To achieve a worldwide culture that sustains the planet in perpetuity we stand together!
To sign-on to this declaration, please …