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This report aims to contribute to ongoing policy debates concerning the merits or otherwise of different waste management options. The intention is also to raise questions concerning the basis for decision making in the context of uncertainty. Such contexts are frequently encountered in addressing environmental issues.
The scope of the report is the municipal waste stream, as defined in the Draft Waste Strategy. We further confine our attention to the following materials:
· Paper
· Aluminium
· Steel
· Glass
· Plastic
· Compostables
Furthermore, we limited our scope to the consideration of four options for waste treatment: landfill; incineration; kerbside recycling and composting. The importance and significance of minimisation of the municipal solid waste (MSW) stream should be mentioned at this juncture, but this is beyond the scope of our analysis. Suffice to say that, in the context of Landfill Directive (Article 5) targets, a 1% increment in arisings growth translates approximately (over 20 years) into a requirement for capacity to divert an extra 6 million tonnes of biodegradable municipal waste within the UK (hardly a cost-free option). Lastly, it is worth stressing that this is not an attempt to carry out a complete assessment of costs and benefits associated with waste management options. We focus on environmental externalities only, and have not tried to capture a number of variables which an extensive treatment would seek to capture (see RPA and Metroeconomica 1999 for a discussion).
The Draft Waste Strategy talks of applying BPEO, but finding out what is 'best' is less than straightforward where the scientific basis for such decisions is uncertain, and our understanding of how specific impacts should be weighted is incomplete. More importantly, assuming that the Landfill Directive targets are applied in a way such that they become a simple constraint upon the 'choice set' from which BPEO treatments are chosen, the actual choices made would still be constrained by something else -finance.1
[ 1 Note, in passing, that depending upon the degree to which minimisation of MSW arisings occurs over the next 20 years, the total tax take from the Landfill Tax could (under optimistic projections) fall significantly. We estimate that the tax on MSW accounts for more than half the total tax take. Supposing that zero percent growth occurred, the Treasury would see a decline in Landfill Tax revenue in excess of £150 million (on the basis of £14 per tonne beyond 2004) relative to a business as usual scenario. ]
The actual choices that are followed through to implementation will be further constrained by another all-too-often-ignored 'factor': people. People do not appear in LCAs, but they are an integral part of approaches aimed at arriving at BPEO. After all, what is not acceptable to citizens is hardly 'practicable'. Public resistance to some waste treatment plants makes this an awkward strategy for meeting Landfill Directive targets where a semblance of local consultation remains an integral component of the decision making process. Equally, it could be argued, forcing citizens to engage in recycling activities suffers from the same shortcoming, though there is at least some evidence suggesting that citizens are positively disposed towards recycling.
This heightens the importance of informing citizens about the options that currently face them. It is undoubtedly true to say that the Landfill Directive will affect all citizens in the UK, directly or indirectly.
Equally all citizens can influence the nature of that effect by engaging in activities which help or hinder the meeting of those targets. Paradoxically, very few citizens actually know this.
Cost-benefit analysis, of course, explicitly does include people. In particular, direct valuation methods do attempt to elicit preferences from individuals that are deemed to represent the level of disamenity that might be experienced owing to the presence nearby of, for example, a landfill or a reprocessing plant. On the other hand, such methodologies are still the subject of controversies of both methodological, and more fundamental (i.e., related to the philosophical underpinnings of such an approach) natures. Some also argue for inclusion of direct and indirect effects on employment arising from proposed changes in more comprehensive cost-benefit analyses.2
[2 In the case of MSW treatment, any positive impacts on employment from using different treatment technologies has to be set against any incremental expenditure. This will typically, in the case of MSW treatment, be taken from tax revenue. As such, any such increase has to be set against the opportunity cost of the additional revenue requirement (e.g. alternative deployment of public funds, or direct and indirect employment effects of reduced taxation at the margin).]
The report starts out as a hypothesis. This is based upon work already carried out in the field and is based upon what we already know, or think we know, about the financial costs of waste management. The hypothesis is that:
although the financial costs of recycling are greater than that for other methods of dealing with waste, to the extent that one is able to incorporate the environmental costs and benefits associated with all methods, the overall economic analysis will show that when one accounts for all costs and benefits, the net result shows recycling to be the best option in respect of materials recovered from the household waste stream.
There is effectively a second hypothesis applied to composting, the wording of which could remain the same, though the financial costs of composting can be much less than those of recycling (depending upon technique chosen). These hypotheses are important since, if they are born out by the analysis, the fact that these may be the preferred options for managing waste (and surveys by organisations such as Waste Watch appear to confirm that they are) would imply that public opinion and a basic environmental appraisal are 'in sync.' Note, however, that particularly with regard to dry recyclables, the recycling of materials cannot occur ad infinitum so that the simple 'either / or' characterisation of the argument is somewhat misleading. As noted in Ecologika (1998), a more correct view may be that one is postponing the final disposal or recovery of the material.
It might be argued that to begin with such hypotheses is to start from a point of view which is in some way 'biased.' We have tried to be objective in this report, but we openly accept that, just as the pith of a mango remains attached to the stone, so no such report can be completely cleansed of the perspectives of those carrying out the research. For this reason, we welcome comments from those who read this document and feel either that it misses something, or that there are inaccuracies in the analysis. It should be pointed out, however, that we have tried to incorporate both sides of what are often quite polarised debates. Where people feel we are wrong to do this, and where they feel they have evidence to support a particular view, we invite comment, but we suggest that there is a lack of appreciation of the extent of the uncertainty which remains in our knowledge concerning a range of environmental effects which are the subject of debate in the field of waste management. This is perhaps the key underlying message of this work.
We note with interest the flurry of activity in so-called 'science communication' studies, the basis for which seems to be that there exist ways of communicating 'facts' to citizens such that their perspectives and those of so-called experts are aligned. Such communication faces inevitable criticism that it is guilty of 'propaganda' (however even the balance of the information provided may appear to be). The fact remains, however, that the views of the public will be shaped, for good or ill, by mediated experience. Indeed, the strategies of non-government organisations and corporate entities may be regarded as closely aligned in this respect since they attempt to shape media opinion (and hence, public perceptions) to suit their ultimate purposes.
There is also a debate going on about where the limits to recycling and composting might lie. Even if one were to accept that BPEO for biodegradable dry recyclables and putrescibles were recycling and composting, and that finance was no constraint upon the choice of BPEO, the fact that Landfill Directive Article 5 targets might still not be met (because of 'limits' to recycling and composting and continued growth in arisings) would imply the need for the 'gap' to be met by other forms of waste treatment such as incineration, gasification and anaerobic digestion (see Section 7.6 below). In view of the public's apparent lack of enthusiasm for incineration, certainly relative to recycling, the question of where these limits might lie becomes significant. Furthermore, the size of any 'gap' between recycling and composting, and the requirements of Article 5, will be influenced enormously by the success or otherwise of the UK in constraining MSW arisings.
The lexicon of waste management is a puzzling one. Something becomes waste on the basis of one's intent to discard the material. It is a moot question as to whether, when kerbside separation of waste is undertaken by householders, they intend to discard the material given that their understanding of the process is that it should lead to re-use of that material (and the disenchantment of citizens when hearing that their recyclables may be being landfilled would seem to support the view that they do not feel that they are discarding them). The Draft Waste Strategy for England and Wales makes the statement that waste should be perceived as a resource. It will be very difficult to bring about the positive transformation that the statement envisages when even after householders have become convinced that what was waste can indeed be a resource, that material remains legally defined as 'waste.' This makes it very difficult to change the language used to describe what we do with materials, yet this may be an important aspect of changing behaviour.
The definition of 'waste' as defined in European Law may therefore constitute an obstacle to changing perceptions and attitudes towards waste. Given the centrality of the definition to a number of legislative instruments, changing the definition is likely to prove difficult, since the wording of the legislation itself is designed to prevent certain rather undesirable practices. Having said this, the perceptions of citizens in other countries are clearly changing, usually, or so it would seem, for a variety of reasons encompassing historic, geographical, cultural and legislative / policy influences.
In Chapters 3 and 4, we look at the financial costs of waste management in local authorities. We review some of what has already been done in Chapter 3, and what is in the public domain. In Chapter 4, we look at schemes for which financial data has been provided. Because some of the information is confidential, we have restricted the nature of the information available. In Chapters 5 and 6, we discuss the valuation of the external costs and benefits associated with the different schemes first through a literature review, then through our own exploration of the issues. In Chapter 7, we bring together the financial cost and external cost data, and summarise the results. Chapter 8 looks at the experience in the Netherlands with waste management, comparing this with the UK experience (the Netherlands has a very high recycling rate by comparison). Chapter 9 draws out some key issues from the work undertaken.