The Center for Sustainable Infrastructure (CSI) today released a blueprint for transforming the Pacific Northwest’s waste system into a world-class model that delivers widespread economic, health and environmental benefits. From Waste Management to Clean Materials details a clear pathway that can create tens of thousands of clean materials jobs across the region by 2040, along with urgently-needed improvements for the health and well-being of people and the planet.
The report focuses on four Clean Materials solutions that work together like the interconnected facets of a diamond, rather than ranked one above the other:
- Prevent waste at all stages: by incentivizing redesign of products and supply chains to shrink carbon footprints, eliminate toxic materials, waste less food and conserve resources.
- Get longer life and more use from products: through tool libraries, sharing services like car-share, re-use and repair.
- Optimize recycling: which happens by cleaning up recycled material streams, ensuring ease-of-recycling in product design decisions, redesigning collection and processing of recyclables, and measuring success based on actual recycling.
- Create jobs at clean production and processing hubs: where used products and materials find new life through reuse, repair and recycling enterprises; co-located industries connect so one’s ‘waste’ becomes another’s resource, saving materials, energy and water; and wastewater treatment plants grow into value-generating ‘biorefineries.’
By fostering dense clusters of Clean Materials innovation, the Northwest can create tens of thousands of jobs by 2040, the report shows. Hundreds of innovative new manufacturing and service businesses in all parts of the region will be needed to deliver Clean Materials solutions—preventing waste, getting longer life and more use from products, optimizing recycling and developing clean production hubs. Building excellence at delivering these solutions at home will position Northwest companies to export expertise, proven here, to other regions and the world—establishing our region as a national and international leader in the Clean Materials economy.
One of the Clean Materials report’s recommendations is a new “Clean Score” that will measure the health and environmental impact of products sold in the region across their entire life cycle—from material extraction, to processing, transport, use and recycling or disposal.