Zero Waste by Robin Murray, Greenpeace Environmental Trust 2002

Europe by no means all landfills have weighbridges). Yet
the lorries that bring in the waste often have mixed
contents from different streams. Household collection
rounds include some trade clients. Street sweepings may
be added to a trade or domestic round. Civic Amenity
(CA) sites may mix trade and domestic waste. Few have
their own weighbridges. Some streams unofficially switch
into others. A major cause of the large rises recorded in
household waste since the introduction of the landfill tax
in Britain has been the seepage of trade waste into street
litter, estate paladins, CA sites, or into the household
dustbin stream. Some waste avoids official disposal
altogether by being dumped illegally.
As a result, waste data is notoriously unreliable. Waste
managers and government planners have no firm
knowledge of the absolute quantities of particular streams,
let alone their composition. Some years ago the UK
Government had to increase its estimate of municipal
waste by a third. Waste Strategy 2000 (and the
Environment Agency) continue to use mechanical waste
composition analyses undertaken for dustbin waste in the
early 1990s as a proxy for the composition of all
municipal waste, and consequently underestimate the
quantity of organic waste by some 4-6 million tonnes.
Twenty-year strategies in Britain are being based on
quantities measured as household waste going over a
weighbridge – whatever their source. Producers required
to fund recycling under the packaging regulations have
been in continuous conflict with the Environment Agency
over the quantities of packaging waste.
Recycling cannot operate in such informational darkness.
It needs to know waste quantities and compositions from
its various sources not just in aggregate but for different
rounds, streets and even households. For planning it has
to know about waste trends by stream and also be able to
estimate its ‘reserves’ of resources – how much newsprint,
or cardboard or clothing there is in any town or city. For
operations it has to be able to monitor the impact of
diversion and what material is not being captured. For
charging, it has to know how much each household or
trader or institution is producing, since the principle that
the polluter pays depends in practice on knowing the
quantities produced by each ‘polluter’.
The new waste economy has therefore become a close
tracker of quantities. Some can be estimated by the size of
bin (regularly re-sampled), some by statistical analyses
using postcode marketing data. 43 Some municipalities have
introduced on-board weighing of individual containers
and expanded the number of weighbridges. All of them
aim to produce detailed, real time data to allow them to
track and adjust their systems promptly.
(iii) an audit of the current waste system
One of the principles of intensive recycling is that it
should transform a local authority’s (or a firm’s) waste
system and not be treated as an add-on to existing waste
management. Many of the savings of the recycling-led
systems have come from persistently inefficient features of
the mass waste system – for example, from the practice of
adding on the handling of mini-waste streams (such as
special collections) piecemeal, to the mass waste system;
from the reduction in ‘defects’ (such as missed pick-ups),
or from the introduction of new systems into areas where
waste management has broken down (high rise estates,
urban street litter, and the fly-tipping of bulky goods). The
costs of intensive recycling can also be reduced if it calls
on, or increases its use of, existing assets – the corner of a
local depot, for instance, or a well maintained collection
vehicle which is available on weekends. The devil of
‘smart recycling’ is in the detail.
An initial audit is a survey of this detail. It will include:
• the assets held by the existing waste departments
(lorries, depots, workshops, bulking bays, containers,
databases, landfills) and by other waste
generating/waste managing departments (notably
housing, education, parks and highways). Most
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