Time for waste to take centre stage

Guest post by Alex Serpo, editor of Inside Waste Magazine and associated website, BEN Waste.

For god knows how long, the waste industry has sought to brand itself beyond a disposal or cleanup service. This process has seen limited success, but it is critical to industry growth and a viable planet.

The reality is, public perception of an industry matters. Industries in the front of the public's imagination (not mind!) attract smart graduates and investment. Those we forget about tend to suffer.

As I perceive it, the waste industry is suffering from a famine of public enthusiasm, but we'll never get there unless we firmly believe there is a road from famine to feast. 

While acknowledging the road may be long and arduous, as a communications professional I thought I'd throw in my two cents about how the industry could help promote the value of the services it provides to the public at large.

Given the huge wave of commentary around environmental issues today, I believe the waste industry is in a unique position to place itself at the centre of the sustainability movement.

Where are we today?

Broadly, the public associates waste management with kerbside collection, blissfully unaware of the waste impacts that come from the commercial, industrial, construction and, increasingly, mining sectors.

People are also deeply concerned about environmental degradation, but wary of action on international issues like climate change due to scale and complexity. They also don't like taxing resource-intensive consumption - they think it's the fun police.

No, the sustainability revolution - or better, evolution - must happen from the ground up. This disconnect between the global and the local presents an opportunity for the waste industry to recreate itself as a proactive force on sustainability that has roots at an everyday, domestic level.

The science is in - waste can take centre stage

The link between waste management and sustainability is easy to make, but if you think laterally, it's surprising just how broad the connection can be.

Waste can take centre stage, Source gyidi at Tumblr 

For example, let's look to renewable energy. The removal of fossil fuels from our electricity supply means more than just a reduction in greenhouse emissions, it also means reducing other undesirables like fly ash, water consumption and land displacement (but you already knew that).

Viewed in this context, the movement towards renewable energy is in fact a form of waste reduction, and therefore waste management. The same argument could be made for almost any other environmental enterprise.

Wastewater treatment? It reduces 'waste' nutrient outflows to the environment. New electric Holden Commodore? A great new way to reduce waste associated with petroleum consumption. Energy efficiency? A way of reducing all the wastes associated with energy production.

Under the banner of 'nature produces no waste', the industry has an opportunity to place itself right at the heart of the new dialogue on sustainability. When the public begins to see waste management as the core of sustainability, the industry will repeal rewards.

Materials matter - energy does not!

By and large, much of the public anxiety around sustainability appears to be focused on the fossil fuel industry. Some have termed this an 'energy crisis', but to my mind it is more appropriate to define it as a 'fuels crisis'.

The total amount of solar, wind, hydrological and geothermal energy available on earth is vastly beyond our needs. Consider that the Japanese earthquake last year released 3.9×10¹⁶ megajoules of energy in a matter of minutes, equivalent to 600 million times the energy of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Energy is abundant,  Sun Inferno at deviantART by GuilleBot 

The challenge here is to find economical ways to collect and store this energy in materials, be they fuels or any other industrialised good. We then need to use these materials as efficiently as possible (read: design for waste reduction). Therefore, the energy challenge is more broadly a materials management challenge.

However, the materials challenge is more fundamental than just fossil fuels and solid wastes. The supply of many materials on earth is a zero sum game; we have a finite amount. This is true for bulk commodities like phosphorus or lithium, or even fresh water - but bites particularly hard when we get to materials like rare earth metals. Consider the global supply of Indium, used in electronics, is expected to only last 30 years.

Some have attempted to convey this message about material sustainability by talking about 'embodied' energy and the 'carbon footprint' of products, but to my mind these messages are too complicated.

'Economic dematerialisation' contains a lot of syllables but at its core is a simple message - 'don't waste as much' and then 'use materials sustainably'. The waste industry is in a unique position to place itself at the core of this new dialogue.

Walk the walk, talk the talk

This new framework starts with you. Waste managers need to communicate to the public, their clients and the friends they meet walking the dog that sustainability is effective waste management.

Communicate that there is no environmental problem that can't be tackled through better waste management.

By and large, renewables energy advocates, conservationists and politicians have dominated public commentary around sustainability. Hat's off to them - but they aren't doing the hard yards in terms of pollution reduction, management and mitigation that waste managers are.

The spotlight won't come to you. You need to go stand it in. If collectively we can make our voices heard, only then will the opportunity come to take the waste industry to the next level.

Ethics, morality and waste

In my post Social media, entrepreneurship and waste, I raised and then parked morality contrasted against ethics, particularly in discussion of waste. I'd like to return to this briefly, considering how Gay Hawkins contrasts the two in her 2005 book The Ethics of Waste.

The Ethics of Waste, Gay Hawkins. Image from Amazon

In this book, morality is a grand discourse centred on righteousness and guilt. This is the "Do the right thing" sort of messaging, and it is the most common mode of communication adopted by centralised communication around waste. If you don't do the right thing, then you are a bad person.

Morality is then contrasted against ethics, which are a series of actions which define the self. One's self is defined by one's actions. And so how one deals with waste becomes a matter of self definition and self expression, centred perhaps on generosity, on giving, on acknowledging one's transience. For waste is, ultimately, a demonstration of our own passing.

It is not a straightforward distinction. Maybe it can be boiled down to moralising is intended to have you comply with an external norm, whereas ethics is a norm formed of your actions. But I think the point is that it resists boiling down.

Gay quotes David Halpern's "incisive description" of the difference between ethics and morality in relation to waste:

The difference between ethics and morality lies in their differing attitudes to value and to waste. According to a moralistic perspective, life is not wasted if it is lived in the service of value. Value gives transcendental meaning to life and redeems the loss of it. An ethical perspective, by contrast, is one that measures, assesses and adjudicates among the diverse concrete practices of living one's life, the various calculations used to determine how exactly to throw it away

To be honest, I'm not sure that helps a lot read cold. Coming at the end of the book, it made sense when I first read the book.

One of Gay's points is that the guilt associated with moralising could be avoided by taking a gentler, more generous tone in our communication. This would ultimately be more effective. Rather than referring to what we should do, perhaps we could refer to what we could do, and that discourse would be firmly rooted in the physicality of waste. A simple (but a little unsatisfactory) example: "you should not waste food" can be contrasted with "your garden wants your waste food".

I will return to this again, as Gay's book is quite lovely and a nice application of cultural theory, perhaps quite clearly located in a postmodernist school of thought. At less than 150 pages, I thoroughly recommend it if you are prepared to open your mind to new ways of thinking about something you probably thought you already knew.

The language of waste

It is not common to hear people talk of "language" and "waste", but when it happens, the discussion is usually around how we should rename to remove "waste" connotations.

"Tips" become "landfills", "incinerators" become "waste to energy" (or "energy from waste"), "rubbish bins" become "MGBs" (Mobile Garbage Bins). And, in the best of all, "waste" becomes a "resource", "waste processing plants" become "resource recovery facilities".

The logic here is Orwellian. Just as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Ministry responsible for war is the Ministry of Peace, we pretend that a new label on rubbish changes its being. There is some sort of alchemy going on here, a collapsing of labels to things. A belief that, if you call rubbish a resource then it actually becomes a resource. And people treat it as such.

They don't. Because it isn't a resource. At least not to them. If it was, they wouldn't be throwing it out. To state the obvious, a resource is something with value to the holder. Rubbish is something with no value. To the holder.

Perhaps we should forgive a bit of Orwell in our lives. Perhaps we can give a bit of a nod and chuckle, but tell ourselves that from the absurdity comes some sense. Calling waste a resource will lead to enough people treating it as a resource.

Perhaps some do. In fact, some certainly do. But for most, what doublespeak does is create a barrier of understanding between the communicator and the audience. It creates a new language, where people have to first work out what is intended by "MGB" (or indeed, MRB - Mobile Recycling Bin), and only then can they process the message.

Most don't get that far. MGB? Don't have one of them, not for me. Resource recovery? Not for me, I don't work in the mines. And the rejection isn't even that explicit.

Creating a new jargon around waste is just what waste does not need. Recycling has enough messages on enough levels. It does not need a new filter of misunderstanding.

How about listening to your customers, and using their language? They persist in calling your landfill a tip? Cool, call it "the tip", and then explain how a modern tip is vastly different to an old tip. They want to know what happens with their recyclables? Don't say they go through a Materials Recovery Facility - use their language. That might be "waste factory". Or "waste processing plant". Or something else. Use whatever your customers use when they describe it to their mates.

At the end of the day, language should not be used to create barriers to communication. It should enable communication. Keep the jargon for technical journals, if you must, but talk true when you talk to those using your services. They are your customers and they deserve better.