Search a forest for its landfill and you will not find one. There is no waste in nature — only material moving from one use to the next. The word waste is a human invention, and so, it turns out, is the problem it names.
Closing the loop, block by block
In a barangay that takes this seriously, kitchen scraps become compost, compost feeds gardens, gardens feed kitchens. Greywater irrigates fruit trees. What one household discards, another collects. The trash bin — the place where value goes to disappear — slowly empties, because there is nowhere for value to disappear to.
In nature, the output of every process is the input of another. Waste is simply a design that stops too early.
This is the circular resource management at the heart of permaculture: not recycling as an afterthought, but a system designed from the start so that nothing needs throwing away. The forest has run this economy for millions of years. We are only deciding whether to copy it.