WHAT IS RAW WASTE?

Postconsumer waste, industrial scrap, and unwanted by-products from manufacturing operations should not be viewed as wastes. Rather, they are raw materials that are often significantly underused. One of the research challenges of the emerging discipline of industrial ecology will be to identify productive uses for materials that are currently regarded as wastes, and one of the first steps in meeting this challenge will be to understand the nature of industrial and postconsumer wastes.