Reducing waste is the sustainable solution, but is not easy
The waste hierarchy makes it clear that it is better - from most perspectives - to prevent waste coming into being in the first place. If waste is not coming into being, then resources do not need to be devoted to collecting, processing and disposing of the waste, thus enabling society to devote those resources elsewhere; furthermore, the resources that were themselves wasted will not have been used and will therefore be available to deliver value in some other way.
Waste prevention remains more spoken about than delivered. Considering firstly the domestic or municipal side of the equation, there have until recently been remarkably few factors encouraging householders to produce less waste.
The focus in London, not unreasonably, has been on recycling, and good progress has been made in this regard in recent years. However, although the total volume of household waste at UK level seems to have stopped increasing in the past three or four years, the full reasons for this are not yet clear.
Changes in bin size and collection frequency seem to have had a suppressant effect on total waste volumes; but the principal driver of waste tonnages is how much ‘stuff’ householders buy. Any given household only has finite room for storage so, in the end, everything bought must eventually be thrown away.
Despite the recent (and ongoing recession) London and UK consumers continue to buy very considerable volumes of furniture, clothing, food, electronic goods, household goods, kitchenware, bed linen, white goods and so forth. The entire thrust of consumerism is predicated on a cycle of acquisition and replacement that shows little sign of abating.
Even headline-grabbing initiatives, such as the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, the research for which revealed that the average UK household is throwing away £50 of edible food every month, is only in the foothills of denting the UK consumer's predilection for the ready meals, processed food and cheap chicken that underpin the problem.
A major review of waste prevention has recently been completed by Defra (project code WR1204), and many of the actions that could be involved in accelerating waste prevention - the rise of eBay, longer product lifetimes, the scope for re-use and reconditioning, increased composting and so forth - are given extensive analysis.
Turning to the commercial or production side of the equation, at each and every stage of the supply chain, materials are over-ordered, used inefficiently or damaged by the production process, and have to be disposed of as a result.
Data are hard to come by on any systematic basis - the efforts under the auspices of the initial Landfill Tax Credits to promote full resource flow accounting appear to have come to naught - but anecdotes abound across the economy's many sectors for how much waste is produced. In the construction sector, for example, poor supply chain management means that over-ordering is endemic, since the expectation is that damage or theft will reduce the volume of useable material by the time it is needed; and in, food retail, it is less costly for the retailer to throw away edible food (having over-ordered) than it is to lose a customer who discovers they are unable to buy their preferred choice.
Much supply chain waste is re-used or otherwise diverted from landfill, of course - construction waste can be used as aggregate, food waste from retailers can be distributed via charities to needy groups - but the data suggest that this only addresses a tiny fraction of the problem.
The problem is, fundamentally, a financial one: too few householders or businesses have any idea of the value or cost of their waste; and for many that do know the costs, those costs represent too small a fraction of total operating costs to bother with. Many challenges lie ahead if the fundamental wastefulness of modern London is to be tackled.