Episode 1: In which we attempt to define waste as a sexy subject

About 10 years ago, when I was starting to get into serious research about waste, I was at a meeting with Tricia Caswell who was then the Director of Global Sustainability at RMIT. In conversation I asked her how I could get more university and industry support for my work in waste. Without a second’s hesitation Tricia said, ‘your problem is that your subject’s not sexy enough. You’ve got to make your subject sexy.” 

Caswell knew better than most the importance of making a subject ‘sexy’. As Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation in the 1990s she almost single-handedly turned around the fortunes of the financially flailing organisation, attracting corporate funding and investment to the environmental peak body and giving it the mainstream appeal and gravitas required to make it a serious player in both the public and private sectors.

The problem is, it’s a lot easier to sell koalas, mountain pygmy possums and towering old growth forests to businesses and other potential research partners than it is to sell mountains of putrescing garbage. Go figure.

The paradox, of course, is that if we continue to trash the planet, there will be no koalas or old growth forests left to save.  Waste is at the very core of most of the problems we have brought to bear on the environment and even though technology has given us better ways of ‘managing’ it, we are generating far more waste now than when we just let the garbage mount up around the fringes of urban areas. 

The ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach works well for governments and industry and makes for clean, modern cities, but it doesn’t solve the problem. The waste is still out there. 

My work on the subject of waste rests on five fundamental Truths of Waste. Here they are:

1.       The rich dump on the poor.

Waste is a social justice and an ethical issue. At the domestic level it’s no coincidence that some of the richest local government areas in Australia – those of north Sydney – transport their household garbage to the southern tablelands to be interred in what was, prior to the Carr government’s council amalgamations, one of the poorest shires in Australia; or that nuclear waste is proposed to be transported to Indigenous land in the Northern Territory. On a global scale, the trade in toxic waste is one-way – from the rich to the poor countries. Everywhere, the poor must deal with the waste of the rich – in both literal and metaphorical senses.

2.      

            Waste is a social problem.

There is no waste in nature. Everything is part of a cycle of life and nothing is wasted. There is only one species on Earth that creates waste, and that’s us. Garrett Hardin wrote in his seminal 1968 essay that there is ‘no technical solution to the tragedy of the commons’. So it is with waste. Technology might make it seem like the problem has disappeared, but it just shifts it around a bit so we can’t see it. The solution to our waste crisis is social, behavioural, cultural. Not technical nor environmental.

3.        

      The waste industry wants us to keep generating waste.

Sure, the waste industry uses the terms we all want to hear – waste reduction, waste minimisation, recycling, close-the-loop technology, but think about it: if we all suddenly ceased to generate any waste the waste industry would also cease to exist. The industry, for all its apparent and stated good ‘environmental’ intentions, has a huge vested interest in your garbage and is very keen to see you continue to create it.

4.        

      Waste is valuable.

There’s an old Yorkshire saying: where there’s muck there’s money. Waste is like gold. In fact, when talking about electronic waste, sometimes waste is gold!  Australians waste 3.3 million tonnes of food per annum – that’s 25% of our food. Waste is valuable, not only to the waste industry, which ploughs a massive $45million per annum into the national GDP, but valuable for us in non-monetary ways. Much of what we know about our own history and human history in general we know because of waste. Today’s landfill is tomorrow’s archaeological treasure trove.

5.        

      There’s no such place as away.

We live on a finite planet. We make stuff then we throw stuff away. It has to go somewhere and just because you’ve thrown it ‘away’ doesn’t mean it’s gone. In order to develop a full view of our culture, we need to know where this mysterious ‘away’ is, or, more precisely, where people think it is.

These are the five truths on which my research over the coming couple of years will be based. They may not be ‘sexy’ but they should be sufficient to start people thinking, and when people start thinking, then they might start acting.

It’s not just about banning plastic shopping bags or cleaning up the streets. Tinkering around the edges of the waste crisis is like pretending we can stop wars and invasions if we all just play together nicely. There are much deeper issues that must be addressed. Waste is our gift to future generations. What they will think of us starts now.