The world produces more than 2 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste yearly, never mind all the industrial and commercial waste.
Japan is a world leader in treating waste as raw material to generate valuable outputs. This is the fundamental re-think needed to anchor potential solutions downstream of stopping waste in the first place.
Relative to other OECD countries, New Zealand’s waste per capita levels are high and recycling levels are low. Nearly 13 million of the 17m tonnes of waste we produce each year goes to landfill, so we are discarding the value of over two-thirds of the material we use.
Waste innovation hubs such as Japan and Europe are decades ahead. Inroads to complex problems such as waste require a test-learn-improve approach in a singular system, a framework with push-pull levers that sets everyone and everything on a more circular course.
This includes recognising zero pollution as a goal requiring pragmatism and some trade-offs.
Currently, we have a patchwork of Government plans to reform and invest, disjointed environmental management, missing onshore processing infrastructure and misaligned incentives that push waste from here to there instead of stopping, re-using or re-purposing it.
How to solve this wicked waste problem? Country contexts differ and there’s no magic bullet.
But there is a smorgasbord of ideas offshore from which New Zealand can find viability, scalability and sustainability. Recognising the waste hierarchy where avoidance is the first goal, and the challenges of waste streams, especially plastic, I’d suggest three core shifts:
First, reframe core principles. Laws, levies, funds, schemes and investments need to be joined up tighter and faster and executed through one modern set of principles, with teeth.
This enlightened framework needs legislation that treats waste downstream of recycling as a raw material and manages it creatively, including inspiring circular behaviour in our homes.
A core principle would be not to import material that can’t be reused or recycled. The inevitable exemptions to this need tough reviews to incentivise the operator ecosystem to innovate us out of waste. .
Second, drive change with innovation. Innovation can catalyse waste system change — if we let it.
In visiting Japan with friend and colleague Rodney Hellyer, whose team studied the waste approach there across four years, I’ve been struck by some low-to-zero carbon emission advances in waste-to-energy or waste to other valuable materials.
A promising non-incineration method is sub-critical water processing by innovators such as J and W Trading Co.
It’s like treating general household waste (organic and some non-organic — including plastic and tyres) with a giant pressure cooker.
The balance of pressure and temperature turns harmful substances into valuable materials. Reducing waste by about 70%, the safe end products include compost, animal feed and even energy. We can and should transform tyres into alternative fuels, steel, carbon black and then compost.
Lateral thinking can locate viable rubbish-to-resource inroads for New Zealand’s situation.
Take inspiration from Denmark ski slope/waste-to-energy plant Copenhill, a forerunner in innovation steps towards zero waste.
Another Scandinavian leap is Sweden’s state-of-the-art Site Zero, which can handle 200,000 tonnes of plastic packaging a year (no packaging incinerated).
In Japan, the town of Osaki on Kyushu categorises 27 types of waste to maximise resource recovery.
The march of Japanese innovation ranges from processing industrial and construction waste into copper wire and wood through to attacking plastic recycling chemically.
I’ve watched Japanese technology turning rice husks into sustainable products. Uncontrolled waste is a global problem and yearly the world discards or burns about 200m tons of rice husks.
Third, we should take a national approach. As our population grows, the amount of waste in New Zealand generates is escalating.
Globally, municipal solid waste is a local Government service and responsibility. Here, that approach has proved uncoordinated, inefficient and lacking in expertise.
To meet the waste challenge head-on, a task of several decades, we should organise at a national level and be led by waste-dedicated expert business minds.
New Zealand is still blinking in the headlights of China refusing in 2017 to be the world’s dump.
Our economy runs on natural capital, and this multi-year waste mission demands nothing less than a revolution. We must bring together muscular principles, coordinated focus, bold innovation, phased progress and multi-layered solutions to haul in our waste.
The Japanese principle ‘Mottainai’ indicating ‘waste not, want not’ (where creativity inspires minimal waste) is apt to the great waste task at hand. Literally, ‘what a waste’.
