It is possible to have a "zero waste" system with a radical change in attitudes by governments, industry and individual waste generators, argues Tom Prendeville
There is a sea-change under way in how we think about "putting out the bin".
Consider that in the past two years:
Japanese riot police had to quell a neighbourhood uprising against the extension of a local landfill.
The Philippines has implemented the first national moratorium on incinerators.
Australia, New Zealand and Toronto in Canada have proclaimed their commitment to achieve zero waste status by 2020, 2015, and 2010, respectively.
Britain has established a substantial new fund to support new landfill diversion programs.
The EU is moving towards banning all organic materials in landfills.
Some 30 countries have implemented "take back" laws, which make industry responsible for the end-of-life management of their products and packaging.
Communities all over Ireland are protesting against incinerators.
Why is so much suddenly happening around the world? Could it be that the world is facing up to the facts of ground-water pollution from landfills, toxic air pollution from the burning of waste, and angry citizens organising into effective groups to protest against these violations?
These unavoidable realities are driving the search for a large-scale alternative to burying and burning what Ireland discards.
You can call us slow learners if you wish, but for some of us who have been working in the environmental business for the last 10-plus years, there is a quiet "eureka" emerging about the truth of the problem of waste. We have always assumed that waste was inevitable, and that our job was simply to reduce and minimise it as much as possible.
The lesson we have learned, however, along with some industry partners, is that waste is not inevitable; waste is the result of bad design and, ultimately, bad policies. The idea of "designing waste out" of our society is a dramatic paradigm shift in how we value and manage our natural resources, and we've given the idea a name: "zero waste".
The last few years have been very exciting and invigorating for many of us as we have watched zero waste develop into an umbrella concept with far-reaching social and environmental ramifications.
A zero waste strategy addresses all environmental protection interests - air, water, soil, species, etc. - and can help create new positive alternatives to how we use our dwindling natural resources.
So what exactly is zero waste? It has five basic tenets:
1. Redesigning products and packaging: planning in advance to limit product resource consumption, toxicity and waste, and recovering materials through re-use, recycling, or composting; designing products for the environment, not for the dump or the incinerator.
2. Producer responsibility: holding manufacturers responsible for the waste and environmental impact their products and packaging create, rather than passing that responsibility on to the consumer. The result is that manufacturers redesign products to reduce materials and facilitate recovery and recycling.
3. Investing in infrastructure: rather than using the tax base to build new landfills and incinerators, communities can continue to invest in new facilities designed to take the place of a landfill or incinerator. Combined with social policies and market signals, the technological advances of the 1990s can easily support the diversion of 90 per cent of what Ireland discards.
4. Ending subsidies for wasteful and polluting industries: pollution, energy consumption and environmental destruction start at the point of resource extraction and processing. Manufacturers use virgin resources for raw materials partly because tax subsidies and other social policies make this a cheaper and easier alternative than using recycled or recovered materials.
Additional public subsidies exist to keep "disposal" costs through landfills and incinerators artificially low by not assigning significant economic penalties to the harmful emissions produced by these facilities.
5. Creating jobs and new businesses. Wasting materials in a landfill or incinerator also wastes business opportunities that could be created if those resources were preserved. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance's report Wasting and Recycling in the United States 2000, "on a per-ton basis, sorting and processing recyclables alone sustains 10 times more jobs than landfilling or incineration". The report notes some recycling-based paper mills and recycled plastic product manufacturers employ 60 times more workers on a per-ton basis than do landfills.
So, the "waste problem" is a resource problem. We at Friends of the Earth see "waste management" as the failure of "resource management".
The first step in changing from a waste management mindset to a waste elimination (zero waste) mind-set is to see used resources as a supply of discards (an economic asset), rather than as a "waste stream" (a liability).
Waste is created when we mix resources (recyclables) together, as in the modern waste packer truck - the ultimate waste manufacturing machine. Governments' justification for involvement in waste management is historically based on waste being a sanitation issue.
If producers reduce or eliminate waste through product and packaging redesign, and if communities develop the means to deliver clean, separated used resources to recycling and composting entrepreneurs, the "sanitation liability" disappears and discarded things become economic opportunities.
We can envisage a market-driven system that competes for the entire supply of discards.
The key to making progress towards the zero waste vision is reasserting the principle that Irish businesses share responsibility for wasting and recycling. Taxpayers and local authorities have little say in the production of things that become waste. Without producer responsibility for waste there is inadequate incentive to internalise costs and eliminate waste. We need to ask business and industry to redesign products for zero waste and to develop reverse distribution systems to take products back into production, rather than dumping the problem on community and landfills.
The goal should be to change the rules so that reuse and recycling can better realise their natural advantages over wasting.
Achieving zero waste means phasing out landfills and not allowing incinerators. Recyclers know that virtually the entire discard supply can be reused, recycled or composted - if its components are separated. The most successful recyclers create systems and incentives to keep materials separated as much as possible. This level of control and specialisation makes it easier to keep toxic substances separate from non-toxic materials.
Many recyclers say items that cannot be safely recycled at any reasonable cost can and should be banned.
The response of the incinerator industry and engineers such as Mr P.J. Rudden is to call for "integrated waste management", in other words, "recycle what you can and pay us to burn the rest". While the rhetoric of marrying incineration with recycling is bewildering, it has proved impossible in reality to maximise waste reduction and materials recovery with a technology that demands to be fed by enormous quantities of waste.
Experience in city after city indicates that, once an incinerator is incorporated into a waste plan, it drives all other decisions.
Tom Prendeville is waste campaigner with Earthwatch/ Friends of the Earth, Ireland