A plethora of manufacturing giants, including 3M, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Xerox, GM and IBM have achieved 90% plus reductions in the generation of their commercial waste in the last 30 years.
While energy prices and climate change continue to dominate the environmental agenda the waste elephant in the room remains constant. With our present patterns of consumption spreading to the developing world, we really are on a collision course with the earth’s geological limits to absorb more and more of our waste in our one-way and throwaway economy.
Most manufacturing companies operating in the West have long term and well established waste minimisation strategies. This is because many manufacturers spend more than 60% of their total revenue on purchasing materials and they are clearly very sensitive to rising material and energy costs. Since the 1970’s, successful companies of all types have been cutting obvious and hidden waste. Hidden waste refers to all work necessary under current methods of operation that can be eliminated if improved production methods were adopted. The hidden waste agenda drove the business process re-engineering mania of the late 1980s and 1990s. It was also an important driver behind many of the capital and labour productivity improvements business has made in recent years. A plethora of manufacturing giants, including 3M, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Xerox, GM and IBM have achieved 90% plus reductions in the generation of their commercial waste in the last 30 years. They all comprise reduced material and energy flows, as well as the elimination of surplus labour and increased capital efficiency.
Some far sighted sectors are moving further, examining options at their design and product specification stages. They are beginning to rethink their traditional linear value creation model which is still largely incapable of accepting returned products, components and materials. Some companies, driven by EU legislation on the disposal of “end of life” products are moving towards a closed loop pattern in which products are designed so that they can be reused and recycled at the end of their use. In the developing world there are clusters of factories emerging, which allow for the easy transfer of waste from one factory’s processes into raw material required by another.
Household waste makes up only a small proportion of total waste generated in the economy, about 10%, although current trends show that domestic waste output rises on average by 3% per annum. The rest of waste comes from the industrial and commercial sectors, and construction, demolition, mining, agriculture and quarrying. Reuse and recycling rates in these sectors are far higher than for the disposal of domestic wastes, and producers are far more sensitive to rising waste disposal costs than households, where pricing signals are weak. Therefore, Government attention is on reducing post consumption waste, because here market forces take longer to encourage behaviour change.
Why this focus here now? Largely because consumer waste, especially packaging waste remains difficult to treat or reuse. It contains many compound materials that make it expensive to segregate and is also difficult and expensive to collect. It is politically preferable to encourage behaviour change by focussing on voluntary actions such as recycling, rather than forcing change more stringently via increased waste disposal charges or poll taxes, or more stringent policing of domestic waste disposal which is technologically and physically impossible to impose.
Recycling fairly low levels of domestic waste might not be our highest priority, but it is a vote winner, and it raises awareness and involvement without anybody having to make real sacrifices – or more importantly having to consider reducing or curbing their current, unsustainable patterns of consumption.
Niki Leahy started working life as an environmental and economic regeneration consultant. She has subsequently worked in the public and private sectors, predominantly as an environmental strategist for General Motors. Her particular expertise and interest lie in environmental management systems, environmental product development and environmental policy making. Recent clients include the Toyota, the Guinness Trust, FSN Publishing Ltd, and the Swiss luxury goods group Compagnie Financiere Richemont SA. Niki has an economic degree, an MBA from the Manchester Business School and an MSc in Environmental Management for Business from Cranfield University. Niki won the ACCA “Best First Reporter” for the Vauxhall Motors Environment Report, in 1997. She has had papers published regularly on systems and strategies for implementing environmental management and financial accountancy.
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