Waste in Inecuria

Inecuria is a continent with over 700 million inhabitants, the majority of which live in high-income, high-consumption societies which produce vast amonts of waste. The excess of waste began to become a significant problem in the 1970s, and by the end of the 1980s it had become serious enough that Emperor Jacras III convened together a committee in 1989 to decide what to do with the rapidly mounting problem of waste before it became a true crisis. All of the Imperial representatives were highly keen on ensuring that the burden of processing waste did not fall on their own country, which made the debate long and tedious, but at the beginning of 1993 they had arrived at a conclusion. Over the course of the year, Emperor Jacras passed the Acts of Cleanliness, a collection of decrees and laws which established the system of processing waste which remains largely unchanged to this day. The Acts of Cleanliness were highly praised by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which commended them as a significant step in the right direction, though still not a full solution.

Where possible, all waste that can be recycled is reprocessed; wood, paper, glass and other such materials are processed into chips which are then sold to manufacturers to re-use. Biological waste is processed into compost and sold commercially to farmers and garden stores, and that which cannot be composted is typically used in biofuel power plants or simply left to decompose. Animal bones are typically separated and ground into bonemeal to be used as fertiliser. All of this is handled by private companies, though most of these were created with Imperial grants on the condition that Imperial officials have permanent and unrestricted oversight to ensure standards are maintained.

The recycling of plastics is a more difficult process, and it is undertaken by state-owned facilities managed by the Imperial Cleanliness Agency (ICA). Some plastics are simple to reprocess into chips which can be sold commercially for a profit, but many make a negligible profit or cost money to reprocess, and some plastics simply cannot be reprocessed easily, or at all. These plastics which are infeasible or impossible to reprocess are transported by the ICA, along with other waste which cannot be recycled, to one of the two Great Repositories, where it will remain essentially in perpetuity.

The Great Repositories have poetic names which somewhat disguise their true nature; in reality, they are colossal landfills, the largest in the world, situated in isolated and mostly lifeless areas where the dumping of potentially hazardous waste poses a negligible threat to the environment. The Western Great Repository is situated in the Calsunarian desert, and the Eastern Great Repository is situated in the Nesarian Borderlands. In addition to a subsidy from the Imperial state, the states of Nesaria and Calsunaria receive direct payments from the other states in return for accepting their waste. Although landfills from before the establishment of the Repositories still exist and are unlikely to ever disappear, dumping waste into them is illegal, and all waste is redirected to the nearest Repository. The Eastern Great Repository is the larger of the two, and is planned to expand to a much larger degree; whilst the heart of the Calsunarian desert has very little life, it is still a natural environment inhabited by many creatures, whereas the Imperial state soon realised that the Nesarian Borderlands - which truly are virtually lifeless - are essentially a gargantuan free dumping ground free for the continent to use.

The Great Repositories attempted to deal with the problem of waste building up in unsavoury locations, but were designed from the start to ultimately be a temporary measure to provide a safety blanket for a transition to an ideal "wasteless" society and not a solution. Despite the streamlined waste processing and regulation introduced by the Acts of Cleanliness, waste continues to grow in Inecuria. Various propositions have been made to deal with the problem, but ultimately none of them are economical - though a proposal which has been gaining popularity in recent years, aimed at decreasing plastic waste specifically, is to levy a tax upon virgin plastics and provide tax breaks or subsidies for the usage of recycled plastics, thereby making recycled plastics cheaper and encouraging investment in recycling.