about resource exchange

Background
How it works
Key Features

Background

Waste presents significant urban and natural environment issues for governments, industry and the community throughout the world.

Waste disposal in particular, presents several pressing current and emerging issues:

having adverse impact on the environment and public health, which can arise at many points in the "life cycle" of waste. These include pollution of surface and ground water, air pollution, generation of greenhouse gases, contamination of land, and noise, odours and other impacts on local amenity;
potential impacts making new landfill sites difficult to locate in already
developed areas and remote locations increasing transport costs and energy use;
continued population growth and economic upturn which in turn leads to more waste and strain on existing and planned facilities, and;
signalling an ecologically unsustainable depletion of natural resources used to manufacture products, many of which are used for increasingly short periods before being disposed.

In NSW (Australia) by example, space for landfill in the Sydney metropolitan area (producing two thirds of the state's solid waste) will be exhausted within an estimated 10 years+. The NSW Government target of 60% waste reduction by the year 2000 will only extend the life of existing landfills a further 8 years or so.

The waste management hierarchy (Figure 1) illustrates a regime of waste reduction tactics and their relative impact on conservation of resources. The hierarchy has spawned a number of responses at each level in formulating new and innovative approaches to waste reduction. Resource Exchange is one such case, facilitating Re-use, Recycling and Reprocessing in the 2nd and 3rd levels of the hierarchy.

The Global Presence Resource Exchange Information System was developed in collaboration with Environmental Protection Authority (NSW) and Illawarra Waste Management, successfully piloted and run in the Illawarra Region since mid 1997. It has since been recognised as the premier Resource Exchange model for regional exchange operators which is now used in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and Jamaica.

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How It Works

Resource Exchange works on the principal that 'one man's trash is another man's treasure'. Resource Exchange facilitates the business to business exchange of waste or unwanted materials.

The Resource Exchange Process

As well as facilitating exchanges of materials, Resource Exchange also:

educates seekers and sources of resources and the wider community to see all materials as resources and seek out new re-use possibilities;
helps develop new markets for materials that would otherwise go to a landfill or a less valued use; and
gathers data on the nature and flow of materials within a community and potential sources and users of materials.

about resource exchange

Background

How It Works

Key Features