Zero Waste by Robin Murray, Greenpeace Environmental Trust 2002

IV The Road to Zero Waste
1. Setting the compass
The first feature of all successful high diversion
programmes is the strength of the idea. For a programme
to have roots and direction it has to have a shared idea of
its environmental and social purpose. Although individual
incentives play a role, it is the common goals which are
the raison d’être and generate the mobilising energy for
the project. They also provide the criteria that inform
waste strategies.
This is an important point for waste managers in the UK.
Too often waste plans in this country have set as their
primary tasks the meeting of EU and government targets
and directives. This places local authorities in the role of a
subordinate, whose goals and values are determined
elsewhere. The danger is that the targets become detached
from the intention behind them, so that an authority will
be concerned more with meeting the targets than with
whether the route they have chosen reflects underlying
priorities. 41
For those outside local government, particularly
householders, who play a key role in the new waste
arrangements both as voters and waste producers,
bureaucratic objectives such as meeting government
targets have less meaning than environmental objectives
such as reduced toxicity and emissions of CO2. It is not
that government targets should not be met: the initial
recycling targets are statutory and binding. It is rather that
they should be seen as a consequence, not a prime reason,
for any strategy.
Sustained political leadership has been particularly
important in recycling for this reason, in articulating and
keeping to the fore the central meaning of the programme.
But it has also been important that the establishment of
the programme is not treated simply as a technical matter,
and that the broader values are internalised in its design
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