BEYOND THE BIN: THE ECONOMICS OF WASTE MANAGEMENT OPTIONS

A Final Report to Friends of the Earth, UK Waste and Waste Watch by ECOTEC Research and Consulting Limited

1. INTRODUCTION

This report has been prepared by Dr Elisabeth Broome, Prashant Vaze and Dr Dominic Hogg of ECOTEC Research and Consulting. It comes at an important time for UK waste management. The management of municipal waste in the UK has to change, for a number of reasons:

1. the current pattern of resource consumption and disposal is unsustainable because it fails to account for the needs of future generations; and

2. legislative drivers emanating principally from the European Commission are forcing it to change. The most significant of these have been the Packaging Directive and the Landfill Directive, and with a Composting Directive under consideration, the changes that may have to occur over the next 20 years or so will make end-of-life materials management in the UK unrecognisable from its current form.

In the face of these challenges, the UK has issued a draft strategy for the Millennium 'A Way With Waste' (AWWW) (DETR 1999a). The draft strategy, the outcome of debates between Government Departments, presents goals but no statutory requirements. The experience since the publication of 'Making Waste Work' does not inspire confidence in the ability of those with the responsibility to do so to deliver on such voluntarist targets. There may be a policy instrument developed to help move the UK towards Landfill Directive targets, but this has yet to be announced. This may require authorities (explicitly or implicitly) to divert waste from landfill, but on the basis of the document, Limiting Landfill, it seems unlikely to specify the mix of diversion facilities in any way.

Rather than putting in place incentive structures (and the necessary finance) which might encourage a move towards more sustainable waste management, the Draft Waste Strategy falls back on a technocratic approach based on Best Practicable Environmental Option (BPEO) and lifecycle assessment (LCA) applied in parallel with the Proximity Principle. There are two elements to BPEO as defined in AWWW. The first is that decisions as to what is BPEO should involve consultation. The second requires an element of understanding of the environmental costs and benefits of different approaches. Inevitably, in order for the latter element to have any meaning at all, a mechanism for trading off these costs and benefits is required. This is important because the different waste treatment technologies have very different environmental profiles.

On the one hand, there are many who would argue that making the trade-offs explicit by laying out each of the physical consequences of the different options is desirable since nothing is hidden from the eyes of those charged with scrutinising the impacts. There is much to recommend this approach given that specific facilities may have local consequences for health and the environment, and since BPEO also requires consultation with local communities, the potential consequences for them should be made transparent. This would be expected to be particularly important where there were believed to be significant health impacts that were locally confined (in which case, the phenomenon frequently referred to in somewhat disparaging tones as 'NIMBY' is an entirely understandable response on the part of potentially affected parties).

A drawback of this approach is that merely quantifying the emissions of pollutants to the environment is rather different from understanding their impacts. Different pollutants will have more or less severe impacts for different species at different concentrations or doses. It is clear, therefore, that some form of weighting of these different impacts may be required. The problem that arises here, however, is that in many cases, the underlying response relationships that move us from 'emission' to 'impact' are themselves subject to some uncertainty. Again, in these circumstances, 'NIMBY' responses seem entirely understandable. Scientific experts do not have a monopoly on truth. Citizens may ultimately prove to be wiser in their judgements than so-called experts, whose title frequently saddles them with the burden of expectation of 'certain' knowledge. As such, LCA has limitations as a tool upon which to base waste management decisions.

Ironically in the light of prevailing scientific uncertainties, and perhaps because the aforementioned approach does not lead to a 'clear decision', there is considerable support for, and momentum behind, moves which seek to bundle environmental and health impacts together into a common metric -that of money -so as to facilitate the trading off of costs and benefits. This would, at least superficially, facilitate a reduction of the problem of choice to a ranking of numbers. As implied above, however, this approach has its own drawbacks. Unless great care is taken, the transparency of trade-offs implicit in the analysis may be reduced. Global impacts can be lumped together with local ones, making light of the quite different political consequences which flow from the impacts associated with different pollutants. Perhaps more importantly, individual components of the total valuations can also be subject to uncertainty at least as great as the scientific uncertainties mentioned above. Those engaged in valuation have tended to field criticisms concerning methodology with varying degrees of success, but surprisingly few have appreciated the significance of more fundamental scientific uncertainties which make it difficult to know exactly what effects one is seeking to place values upon. This means not only that some impacts are difficult to quantify, but in some cases, the impacts, which may be real ones, are simply ignored.

Valuation exercises can raise as many questions as they solve since the assumptions concerning values, behaviour, and the underlying scientific relationships on which the exercises are based are rarely 'beyond dispute.' These questions are at the heart of this piece of research, which seeks to shed light upon the utility of valuation approaches in the context of waste management decisions. These decisions are being faced daily by policy makers and local authority decision makers in the field of municipal waste management. There are clear implications for the extent to which one can claim to know what might be the Best Practicable Environmental Option under given circumstances.