For a field with few institutions dating back more than 50 years—recycling, in our modern sense, less than half that—our practices have managed to become surprisingly well set in concrete…a situation reflecting the public’s perception of the value of the materials entering the wastestream and therefore the level of acceptable investment in dealing with it. Part of the problem lies in the disconnect between what we acknowledge as waste and the factors that lead to its creation, making it difficult to apply management costs where they actually belong. Thus a great many of them flow through to the end of the pipe.
The misallocation of the costs is one thing, but the greater problem lies in the removal of the proper incentive for change. Thus, for the past decade we have found ourselves sucked into a battle with lines so firmly drawn that any chance of compromise has long since vanished. Call the antagonists what you will—buriers, burners, recyclers, converters, exporters, enviros, plunderers, realists, or moonbeams—the result for the waste management community is the same…us’s versus the them’s. But with the creation of the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery (ORCR), things are about to change with or without the permission of those who for years have considered themselves the primary stakeholders in waste management policy.
Ever since the passage of the RCRA, environmental advocates have dominated discussions on how its goals were to be interpreted and pursued to the virtual exclusion of societal considerations. But by expanding the charter to that of resource conservation and recovery, where waste management is only a piece of the pie, then, as sports announcers are fond of saying, “you have a whole new ballgame.”
Whether on purpose or by accident, the switch from the Office of Solid Waste to the ORCR seems to me a touch of genius, effectively moving the us-against-them contingents to the margins of debate, and in so doing opening the door to assessment of the materials-management continuum by a variety of means, such as the EPA’s own Solid Waste Management Decision Support tool.
While public health and safety will remain at the core of our waste management responsibilities, if you accept the premise that the expansion of the ORCR’s focus applies to us as well, we now have a chance to provide the public and its elected representatives with a realistic appreciation of life cycle resource management opportunities.