Waste (orwastes) are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance which is discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. Aby-product by contrast is ajoint product of relatively minoreconomic value. A waste product may become a by-product, joint product orresource through aninvention that raises a waste product's value above zero.
There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
Man is a wasting animal. From the layer upon layer of ash, bone and rubbish, with here a lost flint knife and there a needle polished and rubbed into shape from a splinter of bone and left on the floor of a British cave, through the piles of refuse of the city ofUr of the Chaldees to modern man, the archaeologist tells us what we were and how we lived by what we threw away.
J. C. Wylie,The Wastes of Civilization (Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 9.
