Considering that the waste diversion rate does not indicate the
virgin material replacement efficiency of the waste management
Fig. 5. The road map to zero waste.
206 Q. Song et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 104 (2015) 199e210
system, which is very critical in conservation of global natural resources,
Zaman and Lehmann (2013) proposes a ‘zero waste index’
(ZWI) as a new tool to measure waste management performance.
The zero waste index is a tool to measure the potentiality of virgin
materials to be offset by zero waste management systems. The zero
waste index can be formulated as in Equation (2).