If your objective is:
- Reduce total tonnes to landfill, then your policies need to focus on dense materials disposed of in bulk. That is generally construction and demolition waste. It is also not usually especially harmful to the environment. It's also food waste, which is harmful to the environment.
- Reduce greenhouse gas (methane) emissions, then your policies need to focus on food waste, paper and cardboard, garden waste and timber.
- Protect the marine environment, then your policies need to focus on plastics, and especially plastic bags.
- Preserve economic resilience in scarce materials, then your policies need to focus on rare earths in electronic waste.
- Reduce immediate environmental harm, then your policies need to to focus on household hazardous wastes, potentially even food waste (leachate pollution).
We'd like to do all of these things at once. That is not always possible.
The policy levers to drive reducing total tonnes to landfill will invariably run against paper and cardboard (they are light), plastics (they are light), scarce material recovery (they are insignificant in the total tonnes) and reducing immediate harm (the weight of toxic materials is very small).
Operations do respond to policy levers. They respond to solve problems and to create new problems. Recovering steel from e-waste to reduce tonnes can destroy the chance to recover rare earths Trying to fix a new problem with another set of levers makes for bad policy. It creates confusion and counter-productive efforts.
The ideal is for a policy maker to design an elegant solution that achieve as many of the objectives as possible. Key words are "design" and "elegant". Ideally that policy wouldn't need much policy.
And what are we currently doing? Right now, the dominant push is to reduce total tonnes to landfill. This is what is reported on, this is where the effort is.
Is that what you were hoping to achieve?
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