Abstract for: Peak Waste: a dynamical analysis of global waste trend production

The modern industrial cycle is mainly based on non-renewable mineral resources extracted from the Earth's crust. After being processed and transformed into commodities, the products of mining become are then discarded in the form of gaseous, liquid, or solid waste. A large number of model studies have been performed on the first phase of the cycle, the production of mineral commodities, with a special interest in fossil fuels, with the objective of determining the future perspectives of extraction. However, very few model studies of this kind have been performed for waste and little is known about what the future trends of waste production could be. In this paper, we examine models of the industrial cycle compared to historical trends in solid waste production in some regions of the world. We show that waste production in developed countries goes in parallel with the trends of industrial production and that several region are showing a declining trend. Therefore, the “waste problem” may not be so bad as it is commonly perceived.