As a pollutant, waste demands controls. As an embodiment Zero Waste of accumulated energy Robin Murray and materials it invites an alternative. £12.50 Greenpeace Environmental Trust Canonbury Villas, London N1 2PN, United Kingdom www.greenpeace.org.uk/trust Ac k n o w l e d g e m e n t s This book is dedicated to those who helped make it: to Keith Collins and Alan Watson whose work and perspectives I hope are adequately reflected here; to Bob Argue, Enzo Favoino, Kathy Killinger, Worku Lakew, Jack McGinnis, Cheryl Nash and Marco Ricci; and to the members of the CRN and Zero Waste UK who, with direct experience of the old waste order, have been so central to the shaping of the new one. I would also like to thank Zero Waste New Zealand, the members of Zero Waste International and Greenpeacee for their support. London, February 2002 February 2002 Published by Greenpeace Environmental Trust Canonbury Villas, London N1 2PN, United Kingdom Registered Charity No. 284934 © Greenpeace Environmental Trust 2002 A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 903907 01 2 Design by Paul Hamilton at One Another Printed in the United Kingdom by Russell Press Printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper Front cover image © Barbara Morss Back cover image © David Hoffman Fo r e w o r d Stephen Tindale, Greenpeace Executive Director The issue of waste has become a political hot potato. Central government wants ‘sustainable waste management’ but passes the buck to local authorities. Local authorities decry the lack of funds from central government to enable anything but the cheapest option and reproach householders for failing to participate in reduction and recycling schemes. And the public opposes waste disposal facilities – both incinerators and landfill – with a vehemence they normally reserve for nuclear waste dumps. A new awareness that our society faces a waste crisis has moved waste management from a marginal issue to one at the centre of political debate. Some are stricken with panic at the prospect of overhauling the waste system, but at the same time a new, more positive attitude is emerging. There is now a far greater willingness to see waste as an opportunity and to see the solutions as part of a wider agenda stretching from climate change through resource management to urban regeneration. As Robin Murray eloquently explains in this book, ‘from the perspective of pollution, the problem is a question of what waste is. From the perspective of resource productivity, it is a question of what waste could be. As a pollutant, waste demands controls. As an embodiment of accumulated energy and materials it invites an alternative. The one is a constraint to an old way of doing things. The other opens up a path to the new.’ What is emerging is a polarisation of approaches to waste. One clings desperately to the old way of doing things, the other embraces the new and drives further change. This book details the failings of the old, business-as-usual option, that has been dressed up in the new clothes of ‘integrated waste management’. It then outlines a new approach, a Zero Waste policy, that promises to transform Zero Waste 1 attitudes to waste, the organisational forms used to obsession with cheap disposal to the genuinely worthwhile manage it and, crucially, the systems that produce it. goal of high added-value resource utilisation. Perhaps most importantly it outlines practical policy measures necessary to achieve this. Thus integrated waste management precludes the radical new approach to waste that is urgently needed. The integrated waste management option Fortunately there is a way out of this cul-de-sac. The race is now on to draw up ‘sustainable’ waste strategies. Zero Was t e But the failure of central government, and most waste disposal authorities, to make any serious prog r ess with the The first and most obvious question from the casual ‘r educe, reuse, recycle’ paradigm during the last decade, has observer confronted by the concept of ‘Zero Waste’ is, led to the emergence of a national policy in the UK that ‘Can it be achieved?’. encourages strategies that are anything but sustainable. The term Zero Waste has its origins in the highly This policy, and the local strategies based on it, are successful Japanese industrial concept of total quality referred to as ‘integrated waste management’. Based on a management (TQM). It is influenced by ideas such as simple forecasting model that predicts a maximum ‘zero defects’, the extraordinarily successful approach recycling level of around 40% and a continued increase in whereby producers like Toshiba have achieved results as municipal waste generation, the ‘integrated option’ relies low as one defect per million. Transferred to the arena of on incinerators, or other forms of thermal treatment, to municipal waste, Zero Waste forces attention onto the deal with the large predicted residual waste stream. whole lifecycle of products. Integrated waste management policies nominally give Zero Waste encompasses producer responsibility, primacy to waste minimisation, recycling and composting, ecodesign, waste reduction, reuse and recycling, all within but inevitably solve the ‘disposal problem’ throu g h a single framework. It breaks away from the inflexibility in c i n e r a t o r- r eliant packages. The incinerator element of incinerator-centred systems and offers a new policy commits us to a future in which increasing levels of framework capable of transforming current linear pollutants such as dioxin, a known carcinogen, will be production and disposal processes into ‘smart’ systems generated and dispersed to air and land. Meanwhile, much that utilise the resources in municipal waste and generate recyclable material will be lost to disposal along with most jobs and wealth for local economies. of the energy contained within it, and opportunities for jobs and community participation will likewise be bypassed. The right question to ask, then, is not (yet) whether Zero Waste can be achieved, but how can it be used as a policy Incinerators lock us into an eternal present of waste driver, to free us from the disposal cul-de-sac and break generation and disposal. The capital investment they through the currently perceived limits to minimisation and embody and their relentless hunger for feedstock places a recycling? very real cap on minimisation, reuse and recycling of waste for at least a generation. They provide an easy Robin Murray is one of the world’s leading thinkers on option for waste that stifles innovation, imagination and waste issues. In this book he describes a system of waste incentives. They effectively kill off the possibility of management that addresses all the environmental transforming waste management from its current problems associated with conventional waste disposal and 2 Zero Waste 3 outlines the political, financial and organisational changes necessary to implement this system. The Zero Waste policy Murray describes could move Britain to the forefront of modern ‘smart’ waste management. As such, it provides a beacon for politicians wishing to move the UK from the dark ages of waste disposal to a new era of Zero Waste. 4 I Waste and the Environment Waste policy has become one of the most keenly contested ar eas of environmental politics. At a local level in the UK and abroad, the siting of landfills and incinerators has pr ovoked degrees of civil opposition matched only by pr oposals for new roads and nuclear power plants. Nationally and interna t i o n a l l y , there has been hand-to-hand fighting in the institutions of governance over clauses, ta r gets and definitions of the strategies and reg u l a t i v e regimes that are shaping a new era for waste management. For those professionally involved in the waste industry in Britain, it is as though a searchlight has suddenly been shone on an activity that for a hundred years was conducted in obscurity. Throughout the twentieth century, waste was the terminus of industrial production. Like night cleaners, the waste industry had the task of removing the debris from the main stage of daily activity. Some of the debris had value and was recycled. Most was deposited in fo r mer mines, gravel pits and quarries or, via incinerators, was ‘landfilled in the air’. The principle was to keep it out of sight. Whereas consumer industries seek publicity, this post-consumer industry prided itself on its invisibility. In the past twenty years, this situation has changed dramatically. Waste has moved from the margins to the political mainstream. The prime mover has been a new awareness of the pollution caused by the disposal of waste. This has been, and still is, the entry point for communities and governments becoming involved in what has hitherto been an untouchable issue. But there is now also a recognition of the significance of waste for two other major environmental issues – climate change and resource depletion. For policy makers the question of what to do about the targets reached at the Kyoto summit on climate change is also a question of what to do about waste. Similarly, issues of the world’s forest cover, of mining degradation and soil loss cast a new perspective on old newspapers and discarded tin cans. Zero Waste 5 Fr om the perspective of pollution, the problem is a question contributes 20% of global warming. In the UK, landfills of what waste is. From the perspective of res o u rc e account for more than a quarter of all methane produced. pro d u c t i v i t y , it is a question of what waste could become.