Talking rubbish A special report on waste February 28th 2009 WWaste.inddaste.indd 1 117/2/097/2/09 115:56:205:56:20 The Economist February 28th 2009 A special report on waste 1 Talking rubbish Also in this section You are what you throw away The anthropology of garbage. Page 2 Down in the dumps Managing waste properly is expensive, which is why rich countries mostly do it better than poor ones. Page 3 A better hole The charms of modern landlls. Page 5 The appliance of science Trash goes high•tech. Page 6 Round and round it goes Recycling is good for the environment, but it costs. Is it worth it? Page 8 Muck and brass Environmental worries have transformed the waste industry, says The waste business smells of money. Page 10 Edward McBride. But governments’ policies remain largely incoherent Less is more HE stretch of the Pacic between Ha• businesses makes up just 24% of the total The ultimate in waste disposal is to tackle the Twaii and California is virtually empty. (see chart 1, next page). In addition, both problem at source. Page 12 There are no islands, no shipping lanes, no developed and developing countries gen• human presence for thousands of miles erate vast quantities of construction and just sea, sky and rubbish. The prevailing demolition debris, industrial euent, currents cause otsam from around the mine tailings, sewage residue and agricul• world to accumulate in a vast becalmed tural waste. Extracting enough gold to patch of ocean. In places, there are a mil• make a typical wedding ring, for example, lion pieces of plastic per square kilometre. can generate three tonnes of mining waste. That can mean as much as 112 times more plastic than plankton, the rst link in the Out of sight, out of mind marine food chain. All this adds up to per• Rubbish may be universal, but it is little haps 100m tonnes of oating garbage, and studied and poorly understood. Nobody more is arriving every day. knows how much of it the world generates Wherever people have beenand or what it does with it. In many rich coun• Acknowledgments some places where they have notthey tries, and most poor ones, only the patchi• In addition to those mentioned in the text, the author have left waste behind. Litter lines the est of records are kept. That may be under• would like to thank the following for their help in the preparation of this report: Sarah Brown and Katie Zabel of world’s roads; dumps dot the landscape; standable: by denition, waste is some• the Waste Resources Action Programme; Vera Carley of slurry and sewage slosh into rivers and thing its owner no longer wants or takes Covanta Energy; Nick Cli e of Closed Loop Recycling; Beth streams. Up above, thousands of frag• much interest in. Herzfeld of Greenpeace; Kevin Hurst of Veolia Environmental Services; Bruce Jenkyn•Jones of Impax ments of defunct spacecraft careen Ignorance spawns scares, such as the Asset Management; Jyoti Mhapsekar of Stree Mukti through space, and occasionally more de• fuss surrounding New York’s infamous Sanghatana; Nick Nuttal of UNEP; Robert Reed of Norcal bris is produced by collisions such as the garbage barge, which in 1987 sailed the At• Waste Systems; Ed Skernolis of the National Recycling Coalition; and M. Subashini of the Indian High one that destroyed an American satellite in lantic for six months in search of a place to Commission, London mid•February. Ken Noguchi, a Japanese dump its load, giving many Americans the mountaineer, estimates that he has collect• false impression that their country’s land• A list of sources is at ed nine tonnes of rubbish from the slopes lls had run out of space. It also makes it www.economist.com/specialreports of Mount Everest during ve clean•up ex• hard to draw up sensible policies: just peditions. There is still plenty left. think of the endless debate about whether An audio interview with the author is at The average Westerner produces over recycling is the only way to save the plan• www.economist.com/audiovideo 500kg of municipal waste a yearand that etor an expensive waste of time. is only the most obvious portion of the Rubbish can cause all sorts of pro• More articles about the environment are at rich world’s discards. In Britain, for exam• blems. It often stinks, attracts vermin and www.economist.com/environment ple, municipal waste from households and creates eyesores. More seriously, it can re• 1 2 A special report on waste The Economist February 28th 2009 2 lease harmful chemicals into the soil and industry group, puts it, Why sh bodies water when dumped, or into the air when Who’s the messiest? 1 out of the river when you can stop them burned. It is the source of almost 4% of the UK waste, 2006 jumping o the bridge? world’s greenhouse gases, mostly in the Until last summer such views were Household Commercial form of methane from rotting foodand 11 13 spreading quickly. Entrepreneurs were that does not include all the methane gen• queuing up to scour rubbish for anything erated by animal slurry and other farm that could be recycled. There was even talk Industrial waste. And then there are some really nas• Mining & 10 of mining old landlls to extract steel and ty forms of industrial waste, such as spent quarrying aluminium cans. And waste that could not nuclear fuel, for which no universally ac• 28 % be recycled should at least be used to gen• cepted disposal methods have thus far erate energy, the evangelists argued. A been developed. brave new wasteless world seemed nigh. Yet many also see waste as an opportu• Sewage 1 But since then plummeting prices for Construction & nity. Getting rid of it all has become a huge Agriculture 1 demolition 36 virgin paper, plastic and fuels, and hence global business. Rich countries spend also for the waste that substitutes for them, Source: Institution of Mechanical Engineers some $120 billion a year disposing of their have put an end to such visions. Many of municipal waste alone and another $150 the recycling rms that had argued rubbish billion on industrial waste, according to Much of it is already burned to generate was on the way out now say that unless CyclOpe, a French research institute. The energy. Clever new technologies to turn it they are given nancial help, they them• amount of waste that countries produce into fertiliser or chemicals or fuel are being selves will disappear. tends to grow in tandem with their econo• developed all the time. Visionaries see a fu• Subsidies are a bad idea. Governments mies, and especially with the rate of ur• ture in which things like household rub• have a role to play in the business of waste banisation. So waste rms see a rich future bish and pig slurry will provide the fuel for management, but it is a regulatory and su• in places such as China, India and Brazil, cars and homes, doing away with the need pervisory one. They should oblige people which at present spend only about $5 bil• for dirty fossil fuels. Others imagine a who create waste to clean up after them• lion a year collecting and treating their mu• world without waste, with rubbish being selves and ideally ensure that the price of nicipal waste. routinely recycled. As Bruce Parker, the any product reects the cost of disposing Waste also presents an opportunity in a head of the National Solid Wastes Manage• of it safely. That would help to signal grander sense: as a potential resource. ment Association (NSWMA), an American which items are hardest to get rid of, giving 1 You are what you throw away The anthropology of garbage ASTE can be a revelation. Excava• honest account of their owners’ behav• ular product actually causes people to Wtions of old rubbish tips (or mid• iour than do the owners themselves. A re• throw more of it away, perhaps because dens, as archaeologists call them) provide search programme at the University of Ar• they have bought too much of it. Similarly, much of our knowledge of everyday life izona conducted several studies a public campaign to get people to take in the past. Many ancient civilisations comparing the participants’ own assess• hazardous waste to special collection piled up mountains of garbage. At a spot ments of their habits with the record pro• points makes them put more of it in the in America called Pope’s Creek, on the vided by their rubbish. It turned out that bin. Such campaigns seem to prompt shores of the Potomac river, oyster shells people wasted much more food than they them to have a clear•out but they often do discarded by the pre•Columbian inhabit• realised, claimed to cook from scratch not make it to the collection point. ants cover an area of 30 acres (12 hectares) more often than they really did and ate to an average depth of ten feet. Enormous more junk food and less virtuous stu Don’t ask, dig shell middens can be found all over the than they admitted. For example, they Waste can be used to determine with great world, wherever ancient migrants came overestimated their consumption of liver accuracy how many people are living in a across handy oyster and mussel beds. by 200%. A survey on consumption of red particular place, how old they are, how Archaeologists have found papyruses meat was particularly telling. Rich house• much they earn and which ethnic group inscribed with parts of lost plays by Soph• holds, perhaps wanting to be seen to be they come from.