The concept of ecologistics
<\/strong>The dynamic development of Poland in recent years has led to an increase in the amount of municipal waste generated. Municipal waste should be understood as raw materials and products that arise in households, as well as waste from other producers that does not contain hazardous waste and, due to its nature or composition, is similar to waste generated in households. According to the Waste Act, any product that is unwanted in our environment is called waste. Thus, we consider all by-products of human manufacturing activity, both industrial and economic, as waste. These products are useless in the place and time where they were created. We recognize that waste is harmful to the natural environment, which can and often does lead to its degradation. Every product that is unwanted in a household should be disposed of in a manner provided for by law to the appropriate entity dealing with waste disposal or landfilling. The obligation to organize waste collection rests with municipalities, which have a legal duty to organize municipal waste management in an appropriate manner.
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Planning rational waste management increasingly requires the use of appropriate logistical solutions, and since municipal waste management should also meet strict ecological requirements, we can distinguish a field of knowledge that aggregates these issues into one coherent whole, namely ecologistics.
Ecologistics was created by combining two terms: ecology and logistics, where ecology studies the interrelationships between the natural environment and living organisms. The subject of interest of ecology is also waste, as factors that negatively affect the state of the natural environment. As for logistics, it can be stated that it has already seen many definitions that refer to its interdisciplinary nature. Logistics can be defined as an integrated system of material flow (raw materials, finished products, and waste); these flows are accompanied by the flow of information in order to optimally transform physical goods. It can certainly be stated that logistics is an interdisciplinary field of economic, technical, and information knowledge, studying the conditions, regularities, and phenomena of the flow of physical goods and information in the economy, as well as in its individual links.
Ecologistics therefore approaches waste flow management in the logistics supply chain (Figure 1) and waste storage in a systemic way, which leads to the integration of the entire waste management system. It can be observed that the application of ecologistics solutions aims at making decisions in a way that reduces the organizational and technical negative effects of waste management, while keeping economic aspects in mind, so that the transfer and storage of waste takes place efficiently, and the entire ecologistics process is accompanied by the collection and subsequent processing of information. All this is to reuse as much waste as possible, based on adopted technologies and processes that meet both legal and environmental protection requirements.
Municipal waste as a challenge for ecologistics<\/strong>
The waste problem that many Polish local governments are currently struggling with is in many cases very urgent. More and more municipalities expect difficulties related to waste management in the near future. It is worth citing the example of Italy, where problems related to the lack of city cleaning from municipal waste practically caused chaos. As a result of not collecting garbage for several weeks, about 100,000 tons of waste accumulated on the streets of Naples and surrounding towns, the consequence of which was social tension, public irritation, traffic paralysis on the streets, and a high probability of epidemics threatening human health and life (photos 1 and 2). In Poland, we have not recorded similar situations, yet there are agglomerations where a lack of space for waste that will be generated in the near future is predicted. Currently, in Poland, we generate about 13 million tons of municipal waste annually, which gives an average accumulation rate of about 250 kg per inhabitant per year (Table 1). Observing the amount of waste generated in Poland over the last few years, it can be seen that waste production in our country has been at a similar level for several years, with a slight upward trend (Table 2). We currently generate less waste than at the end of the 1990s. From Figure 2, it can be clearly concluded that a large drop in waste production occurred between 1998 and 2002. From 2003, for the next three years, we observed an increase in generated waste, while since 2005 the amount of produced waste has remained at a comparably constant level.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 5/2009.
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