By Alistair Lamont

In the UK we have had a reputation in recent years for being reactive rather than proactive in this industry.

One of the nice things about being elected to the presidency of a professional institution is that it gives you the opportunity and platform to express your ideas for the progression of the industry.

I am an engineer by profession and as a result I am particularly interested in the development of technology, on a global scale, to meet the needs of our industry now and well into the future. As a starting position, I have proposed that we look beyond our horizons and therefore identified four horizons for consideration. I invite you to engage in some free-range thinking.

Geography, Business, Public Perception, and Time
Geographically, we need to look outward to the international community. We need to learn about and to influence the use and development of good practice. We need to deliver sensible solutions to meet national and international targets for dealing with the residue of human living, compatible with the economic conditions in the countries where the waste arises.

Believe me, we are not alone. For every problem we face, someone else—somewhere among the 8 billion people on this planet—faces the same. This is rapidly becoming a truly international business.

We in the UK have much to learn from the successes and failures of new technology, practices, and discoveries from other countries. Yet we are also years ahead of others, and, with ever-increasing environmental awareness, this presents the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) with further opportunities to engage directly with professionals in the business, like the members of SWANA, in many overseas countries.

Virtually all our recent legislation relating to how we should deal with the residue of human existence has a global perspective—like climate change—and it emanates from the European Union (EU).

Enlargement of the EU earlier this year brought in 10 new member states. This will undoubtedly change the way the European Commission works and the style of its legislation. It will also bring our UK institution tantalizing challenges, as well as opportunities to influence, network, and learn.

Global trading in secondary materials and the international availability of specialist treatment and disposal technologies has a considerable influence on the markets our industry serves.

Where the expertise exists to meet the market demands at near-zero risk to the environment, we should recognize that the developed world has a responsibility to play a global role and reappraise what is meant by the proximity principle.

Let us now have a look at the business horizon for our industry.

What Will our Business Be in the Future?
Undoubtedly, we will still be involved in environmental preservation, but much more than that we will need to be recognized as a mainstay of the resource business. Not just considering material for which there is a current market, but on a global scale, we will be involved in the preservation of all types of non-renewable materials and the sustainability of renewable resources, viewed across their whole life cycle.

This needs engagement with product designers; all types of manufacturers; energy providers; the agricultural, arboricultural, and horticultural industries; land-use planners; fossil fuel industries; and many others.

Resource efficiency means discarding less, and it is high time to embrace waste prevention as part of the added value business we are in. It is also well past the time when we should be reclassifying discards as renewable resources, non-renewable materials, potential energy-producing resources, and materials that harbour a hazard requiring removal from the environment.

We need to recover as much non-renewable material from waste as we can. We must also find the best options to extract maximum value from the renewables we discard, and there are really only two final options here:

1. Return them to the soil from whence they came.
2. Recover the sun’s energy, which they store.

In the first case, it is surely better to return them, as a part of the natural cycle, as compost or digestate. In the second, it makes sense to extract the energy from renewables instead of using up fossil fuels, whose renewal is on a time scale none of us can readily relate to.

Fossil fuels are also the raw materials for many of the essential plastic products we rely on for our current way of life. Alternatives are already available, and we should support them. But for the time being “normal” plastic is a mainstay of our modern lives.

Meanwhile, irrespective of the accuracy of the estimates of world reserves of fossil fuels, we know that demand far outstrips renewal. So, after we have recycled and reused as many plastics as possible, should we not recover the energy from plastics rather than discarding them to landfills? When demand outstrips supply we won’t have the choice anyway. We don’t want to be left regretting our failure to act. So, perhaps we now need to reappraise the use and generation of energy in the waste industry. This will force a sea change in the way we perceive wastes.

The Elimination of the Term Wastes
The perception horizon is one of the most limiting factors in making progress. We deal with several completely separate sources of wastes with very different output controls. The control of the waste output from any managed business—public or private sector—is ultimately in the hands of management. It is therefore reasonable to expect progress in waste reduction, reuse, and recycling here, driven by regulation, cost, and fiscal intervention.

The other sector is post-consumer wastes from each and every one of us as private citizens. Here, it is much harder to make regulations, charges, and taxes work effectively.

Now here is a heretical thought: I’m going to suggest that reducing post-consumer waste is not automatically a good idea.

By way of explanation, let me set you a challenge to name more than five types of purchases made by you in the last five years, items that you expect will outlive you. I’ll give you real estate as your starter. The others appear at the end of the article.

• How much of your income was spent on such purchases?
• What happens to everything else that you bought?

It finishes up as waste! Not necessarily in the country of origin, but somewhere, it becomes waste, and not necessarily after just a short useful life. But how many consumer products have a life expectancy of more than 10 years?

Taking time into account, as consumer spending has risen, so has the quantity of post-consumer waste. At the moment, the amount of post-consumer waste closely follows consumer spending in the preceding five years.

The only realistic way to reduce this waste is for everyone to buy less (more than a touch of economic suicide) or for people to buy less wasteful products (taking us straight back into the design corner again). So what are the other options open to us?

The best we can achieve with recycling is an extension of the life of the material. Some recycling is indefinite: glass bottle to glass cullet to glass bottle, and on and on. Some recycling is down-cycling—glass bottle to glass filter medium to landfill. But, all recycling reduces pressure on virgin resources, and we should support it wherever whole life cycle costs are reduced.

Recycling is usually, but not always, beneficial. But don’t let this heretical thought give you the impression that diverting such waste from landfills is not a good idea. The whole purpose in good resource management is to discard less and then extract the maximum ecological and economic value from the waste, once it is produced.

Differences in Perception
Industry and government currently perceive the quantity of waste we deal with on the basis of weight. But the public sees post-consumer waste by volume.

In Ireland, the government has taxed carrier bags, partly due to their prevalence in litter, and partly due to the perception that they are a significant element of waste. Being a sad wastes management anorak, I have weighed carrier bags. Average weight is 4 grams, or a quarter of a million to a ton. If every UK citizen used two carrier bags per day, we would use enough oil to move every private car in the UK slightly less than 20 yards or sit in a traffic jam for one minute. Should we forsake such an efficient carrying system for such a small saving?

A newspaper, on the other hand, weighs 120 grams. It has the energy value of 15 carrier bags and a useful life of one day. Recycling it loses 20% to waste, equivalent to the energy value of three plastic carrier bags.

Both of these materials, along with packaging, feature more highly in the public perception of waste than a ton of bricks.

If we look at the effect of landfill tax in the UK, rather more tons of bricks have been diverted than have tons of plastics or paper.

Economic controls can be very effective, but they need careful design to achieve the right effect and outcome.

To fully appreciate the value in residual waste, perhaps we have to remove low-calorific-value (CV) wastes from the mass before considering the disposal options. Taking out low-CV material dramatically improves the fuel potential of residual wastes and should reduce its pollution potential when burned.

The public may well be very vocal in its opposition to waste to energy. But the crunch is coming. Soon we may have to choose whether or not we can afford to continue to use our cars—or endorse sensible energy policies and better design that the environment can afford.

In the UK we already have hugely ambitious targets for the diversion of biodegradable materials from landfill. If we are to have any hope of meeting these targets, now is the time to propose the strategies and individual facilities needed.

I make no apology for being controversial. This article is supposed to challenge you and make you think.

Waste has only been a major problem since the cost of materials became significantly cheaper than the cost of labour in production of goods. But the problem has been increasing relentlessly for the past 60 years, and all we have done is react to the problem.

Now is the time we need to be creating ideas for wastes management in the near future and the medium to long terms (say 40-plus years). As a time horizon, that is one working lifetime, and we tend to forget the rate of change.

We need to let our imagination take root and reflect on where the existing rate of progress will lead us in the future. It is about learning about new practices from elsewhere that we can adopt, adapt, and improve. We need to stimulate ourselves to think how we will deal with what seems an unstoppable increase in waste.

We are all frantically coping with the here and now. In the UK we’re trying to give up a heavy landfill habit, but we are getting buried in the present.

With unprecedented and sustained commitment by thousands in this industry, we may reach our short-term targets but we need to consider now how the forever commitment can be met.

It could be said that wastes management is the most predictable business there is besides funeral undertaking. The zero-waste concept will not reduce the need for wastes to be managed but may be fundamental in converting the residue of life into a sustainable resource and thus go a long way to eliminating landfills in the developed world. In the meantime, we may encourage the use of properly engineered landfills in the fast-developing nations as an interim measure to affect large-scale environmental improvement, rather than suffer the global effects of uncontrolled dumping.

To achieve our long-term goals we need to plan at least nationally—and, better still, internationally—to be able to deliver locally.

When sewage became a major threat to life, we developed national collection and treatment systems, now effective for more than a century.

Waste now presents the same sort of challenge. To face it we need coordinated thinking and action. To help this, perhaps now is the time to do some in-depth strategic planning. That means identifying everything that needs to be done, by whom, and with what powers and responsibilities, and we need to be a part of this thinking. This should cover everything from reliable and timely waste data and research to focusing support and input to governments in European and even global policy development.

Looking back, the popular phrase of the ’90s was “integrated wastes management.” But what were we trying to integrate? I submit that the process has to start at the moment a material becomes surplus to requirements and then follows a pre-planned route to its next use. This starts with educating the producer and putting in place the means of collection and delivery.

Looking forward, educating industrial and commercial waste producers is not only feasible but desirable. The CIWM has put in place some means to do this with the waste awareness certificate. But can we realistically expect to do the same for post-consumer waste producers? We should collect this waste in ways as simple and convenient as possible for householders. People want to do the right thing with their waste but need us to make it easy for them.

Looking Even Further Forward
Here’s a crazy dream. Let’s look at a typical urban property. Its input utilities are water, electricity, gas, telecommunications, and road access (for material deliveries and vehicular and mammalian access).

Its output services are surface-water drainage, sewage, and road access (for disposal of discarded materials and vehicular and mammalian exit).

We have six separate underground connections from four separate providers. They are usually located under the other main utility, which is the road. Servicing them usually means digging up the road—frequently! Unless you believe the end of the world is nigh, we can expect this to continue into the infinite future. But does that make sense?

Why don’t we plan for this future? Why don’t we devise a municipal duct to deliver all the services and provide the disposal route for all the outputs, including wastes? Each property could have its own segregated materials disposal point serviced by a computer-controlled underground conveyor system. This would remove all waste types in sequence to batching points for bulk collection and resource recovery. We have the technology now.

I’m told anecdotally that the period for urban renewal is about 80 years. If we start now it could all be happening underground by the end of the century. If you think I’m daft—how many people in 1904 thought that you would be able to travel from London to New York in under four hours, just two working lives later?

And if it does sound like a crazy dream—what solutions do you want to see in your working life, or in just 10 years’ time? We shouldn’t underestimate what can be achieved by the willing.

So I end by urging us all to stop just coping. Lift your eyes to the many horizons—geographic, business, public perception, time—and think beyond them.

Dare to Dream
Dare to shape the future. If you have been racking your brains in response to my challenge for those five types of purchases that you expect will outlive you, here are some suggestions: jewelry—antiques, collectables, and heirlooms, including wedding presents stored in the loft for 30 years; quality furniture made from hardwoods; fine art and sculpture; and three few have thought of —life insurance, financial investments, and tattoos.

Alistair Lamont, MBE, is president of the CIWM in the UK.

MSW - March/April 2005