Ohio State University Fact Sheet

Community Development

700 Ackerman Road, Suite 235, Columbus, OH 43202-1578

Reduce and Reuse

CDFS-107-97

A common sight on warm Saturday mornings are neighbor hood signs proclaiming "Yard Sale," "Garage Sale," "Tag Sale," or "Porch Sale." These types of sales aren't just bargain hunters' bonanzas; they effectively promote a valuable waste management system. This fact sheet will briefly look at the concepts of reduction and reuse as strategies in an integrated waste management system.

What is reduction?

Reduction, as it applies to waste management and in its broadest sense, is having less stuff to throw away. Reduction strategies tend to focus on the consumer. Wise consumer choices regarding purchases and convenience items determine in great part how much a person has to discard.

Individuals can reduce their waste in many ways; agencies, businesses, and organizations can likewise reduce their waste. In industry, pollution prevention or management of inputs to avoid pollution is a current trend. This is an individual choice, however, and problems may arise in mandatory reduction efforts.

Requiring people to produce less garbage is difficult. As consumers and product users, our society increasingly demands, and gets, more packaged materials. Many products require additional packaging--single-service meals, convenience items, insulated fast-food containers, or packaged office supplies, to name just a few. Although reduction of waste is not mandatory, some ways of practicing long-term waste reduction are considered valuable in our society. Let's take a look at a few of them.

What is reuse?

The definition of reuse is "using a product or material again." Reuse, as it refers to solid waste management, means to prolong the life of an item before recycling or eventually or ultimately discarding it. As mentioned above, we subscribe to many reuse patterns in our society. Perhaps the most common reuse practice is buying and selling antiques. Although antiques, such as furniture, have served their original purpose, they are kept around and gain value through their aging. Because they are not discarded as trash for much longer than their original life, antiques benefit solid waste management.

Another familiar form of reuse is the garage sale or tag sale. A person who has finished using an item, or simply no longer wants it, sells it to someone else at a very low price rather than discarding it. As with antiques, the value for waste management in these behaviors is the reduction of immediate waste going into the waste stream.

Donating clothes to the needy; handing clothes down within a family; selling an old refrigerator, stove, or freezer for parts or to a secondhand shop; or using parts from old automobiles or washing machines also reduce the amount of waste in the waste stream. In the United States, reuse has long been associated with thriftiness and efficiency. The pioneers were careful not to throw things away--for example, scraps of fabric from old clothes were sewn into beautiful new quilts. During World War II, reuse was considered imperative. Home and school crafts have long been made from miscellaneous leftovers from the kitchen, the living room, the garage, and the study.

In industry, some states and regions reuse or recapture a byproduct from one industry and use it as an input in another industry. This is called "waste exchange."

Why is it important to reuse?

Think about what you've thrown in your trash can in the last week. Have you discarded paper when only one side of it is written on? Or have you discarded cardboard boxes, old clothes, or glass jars?

Much of our trash could be used again. Not surprisingly, many candidates for reuse include the very heavy, bulky items, which are often made of glass, metal, and boxboard. These items increase the weight and, therefore, the cost for disposal of our trash. These items also consume a great amount of valuable landfill space. Many reusable items are noncombustible and hinder the burning operation of an incineration system. Finally, most reusable items are inorganic and can contaminate compost production.

Reuse is far less expensive than recycling, incineration, composting, or adding to a landfill because reuse involves no processing of the material from one state to another. Reuse does not involve common hauling or shipping costs or handling fees. These avoidances of cost place reuse high on the scale for the integrated solid waste management system (Figure 1). By withholding entry of these materials into the waste stream, both disposal costs and, in some cases, disposal itself are avoided.

The old adage "a penny saved is a penny earned" aptly applies to reuse in the waste management system. The pennies are saved by avoiding disposal costs and the earnings are through increasing the life of our resources.

Figure 1. An integrated solid waste management system