Waste as an inevitable by-product of living and management
The generation of waste and various impurities is inextricably linked to all manifestations of life, the processes of producing means of production and means of satisfying consumer needs, the preparation of these means for consumption, and the consumption process itself. Due to an innate instinct for cleanliness and order, people remove unnecessary, useless items (generally treated as waste) and impurities (also called trash) from their surroundings. The problem of environmental hygiene ethics is ancient. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses,
leading the Israelites through the desert, commands them to maintain cleanliness in the camp: You shall have a place outside the camp and you shall go out there beyond the camp, you shall provide yourself with a peg, and when you go outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and when you return, you shall cover what you have
gotten rid of [1]. The polluted external environment (soil, water, and air) transforms from the basis of human life into a center of health and life threats… Soil, water, and air, due to the natural processes occurring within them, possess within certain
limits the ability to self-purify, i.e., to neutralize impurities. As long as they are generated in small quantities, and unfavorable conditions do not reduce the self-purification capacity of the external environment, man can pay less attention to the
ecological threat arising around him. It increases in large clusters of collective life. Within a city, the natural ability of the external environment to self-purify is limited and weakened, because in a relatively small area, all
phenomena of social and economic life occur with increased intensity, and the process of impurity generation becomes continuous. The urbanization of the countryside causes these products of civilization to appear there as well with increasing intensity. The logistics of removing
all impurities generated in the sphere of existence and economy is currently the main instrument for the rationalization of ecological environmental management, and their maximum utilization is the fundamental imperative for the optimization of natural
and processed resource management.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2002/5.