Definition of Real Estate
1 : property in building and land
2 : SPACE, CAPACITY
// the limited real estate on hard drives
// landfills are a type of real estate
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Chicago’s 2021 waste strategy is to “prioritize the intervention of material before it enters the waste stream[1].” This is the essence of landfill diversion, which is any intervention that directs “waste” away from a landfill and toward an alternate destination.
A landfill and a warehouse can be defined as real estate dedicated to the storage of stuff. However, once material is dumped in the landfill it is lost in the landfill. This is partly why businesses and organizations are beginning to divert their resources from the landfill in earnest by using circular economic business strategies.
Landfill Diversion in Action
Chicago’s Rebuilding Exchange, Share our Spare, and EcoShip are examples of this concept – they are storage sites (i.e., real estate) dedicated to items that have strong consumer demand: building supplies, infant apparel, and packaging materials.
Reuse Before Recycle
The reuse of an item is more energy efficient than the recycling of an item. For example, reusing a cardboard box takes much less energy than shredding the box to manufacture a new box out of recycled cardboard. Same thing with glass. Recycling conserves resources, but reuse conserves more!
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