Solid waste is the output of human activities. Its outburst is one of the largest challenges related to resource depletion and environmental risk in the world for this century. The textbooks indicates solid waste management with the treatment and disposal, which is dependent on minimization, recycling, and detoxification.

Treatment and disposal for solid waste indicate recycling and detoxification for the valuable and toxic materials contained in waste, respectively. In the long run, how to quantity the recycling and detoxification is the unsolved scientific problem in the world.  In recent years, our team was granted a national key project to illustrate the fundamental law of environmental-resource attribute.

The environmental-resource interacting attribute (ERIA) quantifies the difficulties of resource recovery and environmental impact elimination in industrial waste processes and provides important insights into the recycling potential and environmental burden of industrial waste. The study measured ERIA in detail in twelve industrial waste categories four treatment pathways.

Indeed, this work has an outstanding innovation to illustrate the waste attribute, which of project was funded by National Key R&D Program of China on Solid Waste Recycling. The project is the first one of National Key R&D Program of China on Solid Waste Recycling in the 13th five program. Therefore, this project is positioned as the fundamental base to support other over 100 projects (engineering or policy) of the program in the years of 2018-2022.