Prevent Waste
Regardless of its nature, waste consumes resources, time, effort, and money both when it is created and then when it is handled and managed at end of life, with hazardous waste requiring even greater investments for monitoring and control. As has been stated on numerous occasions, creating, handling, storing, and disposing of waste is necessarily an expense and does not add value in terms of innovation or performance. In processes of production, therefore, waste is always undesirable in all its forms.
Ideally, molecules, products, processes and systems would be designed to not create waste. That is, we should aim to eliminate the concept of waste by designing the outputs to be feedstocks elsewhere mimicking natural systems. Whether the waste is material, energy space, time or the derivative of all of these, money, there are design strategies that can and are being implemented in Green Chemistry and Engineering to eliminate the concept of waste.