Zero Waste by Robin Murray, Greenpeace Environmental Trust 2002

conversion scheme from their share of the £1.127
billion allocation made in the current spending review,
and or any similar allocation in the subsequent round
The government should ensure that this happens and if
necessary issue the requisite guidance for the final two
years of the current review period.
Conclusions on sourcing
There are already substantial waste-related funding flows
circulating in the economy, all of which are set to expand.
The landfill tax credit scheme and the packaging recovery
arrangements have together generated some £750 million
in the past five years, and the Government’s current
spending review was planned to inject a further £500
million over the three years up to 2003/4. This finance is
substantially lower than that available in high performing
recycling economies like Germany, but could have had a
major impact if it had been used ‘smartly’. This has not
been the case. The funds have remained unco-ordinated,
their control and use shaped more by concerns to increase
commercialisation and limit public expenditure than by
achieving a major shift to waste minimisation.
A five-year conversion programme to intensive re c y c l i n g
should not there f o re be held back by lack of funds. What is
re q u i red is a ‘re-wiring’ of existing funds, and a clear
d i rection be given for their use. This in turn would pro v i d e
the context for a major programme of private investment – in
all stages of the ‘closed loop’ economy – which govern m e n t
leadership on recycling has stimulated elsewhere.
4. Institutions
One of the developments in the field of industrial policy
over the last decade has been a shift from the arguments
about state versus markets, to the question of the design
of institutions. The literature on successful long wave
transitions from one industrial era to another has similarly
moved beyond a primary emphesis on technology to focus
on the interplay between new organisational paradigms
and emerging technologies. Historically, the countries that
have been able to develop appropriate organisational
structures have been best able to capitalise on
contemporary technological possibilities.
The economists’ new interest in organisations cuts acro s s
the former poles of debate. It is no longer a question of
the shift from the public to private sector (or vice versa),
or from tax/grant-based economies to markets. It is
rather an issue of the nature of the institutions in which
markets are embedded, or that undertake public/nonmarket
functions.
In the case of waste this poses a particular challenge. On
the one hand it requires a state that can play a creative
public role as long-term strategist, a setter of parameters
and a guardian of public and environmental health. On
the other it requires the opening out of the former waste
sector to the knowledge industries and to the dynamic of
the third ‘social-market’ sector, whose innovative ways of
reconciling the market with social and economic goals are
so pertinent to Zero Waste.
New governance
As far as the public functions are concerned, my argument
is that there have been serious limitations to the neoliberal
model of government as it operated in the waste
field in the 1990s. There are three institutional problems
that need to be directly addressed:
• the relegation of the government function of strategic
direction, and the redefinition of its role as market
facilitator, has led to a subaltern culture in
government. It is skilled in critical faculties and the
management of meaning, and in the application of
market analysis to external propositions. But it has
been leached of know-how and strategic confidence,
and has therefore failed to establish an autonomous
public identity for a function that demands it;
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