Why Collecting Waste is Key to Addressing the Crises of Climate Change and Plastic Pollution
I’m imagining most of you reading this - hopefully not all, if this gets to the right places - are quite used to someone, employed either directly by your municipality, or by a contractor providing services to them, collecting your waste periodically and ‘taking it away’. You might not know exactly what fate it suffers thereafter (have you ever even thought to ask? And if you’re a business, have you checked?) but you’re probably quite glad of it being removed.
Where I live, in the UK, on average, each household generates about a tonne of waste each year (in England, around 22 million tonnes of household waste are generated by around 23 million households). Estimations of the bulk density of uncompacted waste vary, not least according to its composition, but it’s safe to assume that this tonne of waste would occupy a volume, in its uncompacted state, of between 5 and 10 cubic metres.
If that waste was not being taken away, periodically, what would people in the UK do with the stuff that they currently ‘throw away’ (and I include in that whatever they are separating for recycling)? What would happen to the amount of waste people generate? Would they generate less? Might some people not just tear off all packaging in the shops where they bought things? What would the shops do? And what about the on-line sellers? Would an ability to deliver goods free from packaging become a selling point? Would this change the choices people make about what they buy? Might producers be induced to change how they package what they sell? Would less food be wasted? Might more vegetable peelings and the like be fed to chickens? Or would some people burn their waste? Maybe some people would just throw it into the streets? Fly-tipping could get a lot worse.
It’s an interesting thought experiment because, before long, you can’t help arriving at the conclusion that whilst there’s some private benefit to households derived from the waste collection service (not least, a reduced ‘hassle factor’), and whilst there’s also a public good element to having a better waste management service (this would be more apparent if collections were withdrawn), the people who sell stuff are also beneficiaries of the fact that UK citizens have a convenient waste collection service in place. If anything, this has become more apparent as COVID-19 has turbocharged the pace at which consumers shift from physical to on-line shops. The sheer volume of cardboard being used - and set out on a weekly basis for recycling where I live - suggests that the space that would be occupied by a year’s waste is going up, not down.
As patterns of consumption have become increasingly globalised, and as a wide range of consumer goods have come to be sold to people all over the world, so the issue of how to manage the resulting waste has become a correspondingly global endeavour. Yet well-functioning systems for managing the resulting wastes have diffused far more slowly than the products that need to be managed. There are many reasons for this, but fundamentally, this is a question of good old-fashioned political economy. The state doesn’t take the responsibility seriously (it’s never had to arrange for this before); it may promulgate measures that tell municipalities to sort things out, but with no money, no incentives, and no sanctions, frequently, nothing happens. And the companies who sell the products whose associated wastes give rise to the problems have no responsibility to fund systems to deal with these wastes, let alone to ensure that whatever they sell has no prospect of leading to problems wherever it the sale happens. Let’s face it, if you know that there’s no waste collection system, and you’re selling stuff in plastic packages that have no hope of being recycled, then how responsible, really, are you being?
So, in countries where wastes are not collected, then unless the items that people discard are sufficiently valuable to justify someone else picking them up and selling them for recycling (or as ‘fuel’), the thought-experiment I’ve just described is reflected in the day-to-day reality. We no longer have to challenge ourselves to guess what might happen. People consume packaged consumer goods, and stuff gets ‘thrown away’, albeit not on the same scale as in countries such as the UK. And whilst it’s true that there may be no such place as ‘away’, in many locations across the world, the rivers and oceans might justifiably lay claim to that title. Unless, and until, there are waste collection systems in place more or less everywhere, then this problem will persist - as long as no other mechanisms are used to prevent the sale of stuff that gives rise to the problem.
Why should we care? I can think of a few reasons.
The first reason relates to climate change. Insofar as these things are well understood, it’s estimated that around half of all global emissions of greenhouse gases are associated with making materials, such as metals, cement, plastics and other (i.e. non-plastic) textiles, and in (directly or indirectly) feeding ourselves. These materials are used to make infrastructure, such as cycle-lanes, bridges, and railways, to make homes for people, to make workplaces for people, and to make the stuff that we consume. What we consume doesn’t last forever, and the stuff that people don’t want any more can be discarded, and may end up as waste.
The World Bank periodically seeks to estimate the amount of municipal waste that is generated across the world each year. These data are not of high quality but they are as good as exists for making global estimates of the amount of stuff thrown away each year. If we use these data as a basis for estimating how much waste may be generated by 2030, then we can make a stab at estimating how much carbon dioxide is embodied in the materials that we discard each year in municipal ‘waste’. I estimate that figure to be of the order 7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030. Globally, around 40 billion tonnes of CO2 are emitted annually, or including other greenhouse gases (GHGs), around 50 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent. So, on an annual, basis, by 2030, unless production processes themselves are significantly decarbonised, we will be discarding stuff which has, embodied within it, some 14% of current global emissions. That proportion may be greater depending on the trajectory for future emissions that can keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.
Once waste is generated, though, that problem - of GHGs emitted in production - is in the past. The discarding of all that stuff, though, has further consequences for climate change. In countries where waste is collected, some might be recycled, but rather more - still - is sent to managed disposal sites, or is incinerated, or is treated in other ways. Some is also littered, though this tends to be related to things which are consumed ‘on-the-move’. There’s also - still - a thriving trade in illegal ways of managing waste, not least, sending the stuff to a place called ‘away’ in other countries that have limited (if any) means of dealing with what has been sent their way.
In countries where large shares of the population still have no access to a convenient waste collection service, as well as ways we’ve just mentioned, waste can also be burned in the open, or sent to ‘less well-managed’ disposal sites. In addition, the littering of stuff is less likely to be limited to what’s consumed on-the-move.
However waste gets there, at disposal sites, waste can degrade to generate methane, a short-lived greenhouse gas, and fires associated with methane may occur. In incinerators, burning fossil-derived carbon generates carbon dioxide, while open burning leads to emissions of black carbon, a short-lived greenhouse gas, as well as carbon dioxide.
The way all these emissions are reported on is, by and large, absolutely abysmal. Both the quality of the data, and the way those data are presented in GHG inventories, renders ‘what is happening with waste’ wholly misleading. So, as well as ensuring that emissions associated with consumption (and chucking stuff away) are poorly understood, the reporting of emissions from waste is destined to lie at the heart of some terrible decisions that will undoubtedly be made over the coming decades.
The second reason is related to the growing scourge of plastic pollution. When only ‘stuff of value’ is collected by informal collectors where they are active, then in the absence of waste collection services, the waste that’s discarded into the environment may be thrown directly into rivers or oceans, or otherwise, it may be transported there, not least following heavy rainfall events. Even if plastics never reach water courses, they may simply fragment over time and contribute to microplastic pollution of soils. They are disinclined to simply disappear altogether, and although the study of the issue is rapidly growing, we are in the early stages of understanding the full picture in terms of the impacts of what we are doing.
Can we improve this state of affairs? I firmly believe that we can, and that we must, in order to respond to the challenge of climate change, and to choke off the flow of plastics into oceans. The great thing is that by doing a few things very well, we can make a significant dent in both problems simultaneously.
At the heart of the action is the collection of waste. Yes, it’s really that unsexy. No moonshots, no unproven technologies, no need for large pieces of infrastructure. A comprehensive and convenient system for collecting waste is the basis for ensuring that a wide range wastes can be made available for recycling, and for ensuring that what cannot be recycled can be delivered to suitably equipped and managed sites. A well-designed collection system, on its own, is not sufficient to guarantee proper management of waste. Equally, to ensure a system of waste management fit for a net-zero world, it is a necessary component, however it is actually configured in local circumstances.
Along with former colleagues, I estimated that the current level of emissions from waste management to be of the order 1.2 to 1.4 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent, assuming global warming potentials (GWPs) over a 100 year period as per the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment report (and in future blogs, I’ll also throw my weight behind the views of many scientists who have shown what a poor measure of equivalence GWP100 is for aggregating the effect of pollutants that exert their warming effects over different time-frames). If waste is collected and well-managed, everywhere, by 2030, and without using any ‘moonshot’ technologies, but relying on existing approaches and implementing them very well, better waste management could reduce GHG emissions by 2.8 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent (see Figure below). More than half of this relates to us ‘keeping’ some of those embodied GHGs in use through increasing recycling, though both separating at the point of collection, and sorting the remainder (residual waste).
Key Elements in Reducing Global GHG Emissions through Better Waste Management, in Debbie Fletcher, Ann Ballinger, Matt Smith, Lily Chapman and Dominic Hogg (2021) Waste in the Net-Zero Century: How Better Waste Management Practices Can Contribute to Reducing Global Carbon Emissions, May 2021.
But the great thing about this is that, to a very considerable extent, the pollution of oceans and rivers by discarded plastics can be radically reduced through the same measures. Virtually all of the better known studies identify that the key issue in relation to macroplastics, as a source of plastic pollution, is the absence of waste collection, and the mismanagement of waste once it has been collected. For example, Breaking the Plastic Wave notes: ‘Based on our analysis, 61 per cent of total macroplastic leakage originates from uncollected waste, and this share could grow to 70 per cent by 2040 in the BAU Scenario as collection services fail to keep pace with macroplastic waste generation’. Furthermore, lest it be considered that this makes light of the potential for reducing plastic consumption in the first place, then it might make sense to distinguish between ‘proximate’ and ‘ultimate’ causes of the plastic pollution problem: the main proximate cause is lack of collection / mismanagement of waste, but the ultimate cause relates to consumption and use of plastics. In this latter respect, another recent paper by Borrelle et al notes: ‘Although many stakeholders heavily promote only one of these strategies [i.e. plastic reduction, waste management, and environmental recovery] as the “best one”, these results demonstrate that drastic reductions in future plastic emissions cannot be achieved with any one strategy independently’. Breaking the Plastic Wave reaches a similar conclusion: ‘There is a credible path to significantly reduce plastic leakage to the ocean, and it requires all solutions to be implemented concurrently, ambitiously, and starting immediately’. Indeed, the remaining ‘leakage’ in the System Change Scenario in Breaking the Plastic Wave seems to relate largely to the fact that, globally, 18% of plastic waste is deemed to remain ‘uncollected’ in this Scenario.
So, plastic pollution of rivers and oceans - not least, that related to microplastics - will not be eliminated by this measure alone, but without it, a substantial chunk of the problem will remain. Complementary policy measures will be needed, but much can be achieved as a matter of course in the pursuit of better waste management. And if, along the way, we manage to reduce generation of food wastes, and reduce use of materials which are not really necessary, then so much the better.
The key issue here is that waste collection is a necessary component in delivering climate change benefits, and the collection of macroplastics that is implied is also a necessary part of a strategy to address pollution of rivers and plastics. At the moment, a vast amount of funding from businesses seems to be targeting the problem of plastic pollution, sometimes in narrow terms. We need to flip this on its head. There is no sense in seeking to resolve a problem that is rooted in the mismanagement of waste by focussing ‘only’ on plastics. Different materials producers have an interest in improving the management of all the different waste materials, and so it makes far more sense for businesses to work together to resolve the massive problem of waste management in a coordinated manner. We don’t need an Alliance to End Plastic Waste, or a New Plastics Economy, or a global treaty on plastic waste. We need an Alliance to Reduce Resource Consumption and Manage Waste Properly, and an Economy to Minimise the Impact of Consumption and Waste. The problem is far larger than plastics, even if it may well make sense for some - perhaps many - plastic items and packaging formats to be targeted for phase-out. The same, though, applies to some wastefully consumed, and frequently littered, items made from materials other than plastics.
There is a dire need to raise the profile of the central role of collection of waste in dealing with these issues. There is an urgent need to develop a framework through which it can be adequately funded - ironically, precisely because the activity is unsexy, with less by way of opportunities for the cutting of ribbons at an accompanying opening ceremony, funding is not always flowing to the places it needs to reach. It’s an obvious target for so-called ‘climate finance’, but it will also need sources of finance to be stitched together in novel ways to generate the best outcomes. Mechanisms by which producers support the funding of collection and management of items which they sell have a key role to play. Consideration should also be given as to how this financial support can enable meaningful participation by existing informal actors as a means to seek to ensure livelihoods can be sustained, though accepting that the status quo is no longer an option.
Waste management is always a messy business, dealing with materials that embody all our wants, and our desires, and our ceaseless battle against entropy. There might not be so many university graduates gagging to engage in a career in ‘waste management’, albeit that the issue of ocean plastic pollution might have piqued the interest of a few. Yet the world needs every one of them it can get right now, as there is an absolutely enormous task that needs to be undertaken to stop the rise of plastic-laden seas from threatening the lives of coastal communities across the globe.