Guy Salmon, the long-serving campaigner for the environment, has floated the idea that New Zealanders rethink their approach to environmental policy and try being a bit more Nordic.
It's an interesting notion - one that might make many people rather defensive - to suggest that we are in some way less capable of environment stewardship than the Swedes, Finns and Norwegians.
However, there is much information to suggest that the Nordic nations are indeed consistently more successful in achieving their environmental policy objectives. New Zealand's performance has been patchy at best.
Salmon, and others, have hit on one of the issues in environmental policy that is frequently overlooked - the need for clear targets and the milestones we need to reach along the way. The Nordic countries set high level goals, with cross-party agreement, and hand over the implementation of environmental policy to an independent board comprising some of the country's most trusted individuals. They set the targets and milestones and implement the necessary policy initiatives.
It is not my intention to advocate for one system over another - simply to stress that there are many approaches to policy development and implementation. Ours might be the best. Or then again it might not be. Surely we would do well to look above the minutiae of our current process, beyond the detail of discretionary hearing timeframes, permitted activity lists and suchlike, and consider the alternatives.
An alternative might focus more on setting bold national targets. Sweden and Norway have these, but by and large New Zealand does not.
I am reminded of the role of targets not only by research, but also by the practical experience of working through a waste minimisation project for tertiary education providers in Canterbury. All of the Big Four providers - Lincoln University, University of Canterbury, the College of Education and the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology - are working on waste minimisation together.
It's an enormous task for the education sector, with a student population constantly on the move. And what becomes clear immediately is that so much of the effort that goes into a waste minimisation programme is providing "end of pipeline solutions".
It makes you wonder what the Swedes and Danes would do.
I would hazard a guess that they would spend little time on collecting, separating and sorting the torrent of waste materials that comes out of a university or polytechnic. If you are constantly dealing with the outflow, it becomes too hard to reach the next waste reduction target.
I suspect the Scandinavians would focus on designing waste out of the system, by requiring goods to be designed for reuse, disassembly, or for total recovery using Design-for-Environment (DFE) principles.
This would inevitably require some form of regulatory response. In the Nordic countries, which all have strong market-led economies, it's likely that a mandate against wasteful designing would be supported - because of its direct connection with the country's high-level environmental goals. One can only wonder how this idea would be received by the business sector in New Zealand.
Waste minimisation in New Zealand is full of economic complexities and behavioural issues and the fear for companies and organisations is that, without clear targets and milestones, their efforts could be a waste of time.
Companies will benefit from an immediate reduction in waste disposal costs, and fulfil a moral obligation to divert wasted resources from landfill built at huge cost.
But how can they be effective in the long term when there is such a heavy dependence on voluntary compliance and the exercising of individual choices? Why shouldn't there be some assistance in the form of design standards?
All it would take is a directive from Government that the business sector must provide products that deliver safety, functionality, environmental sustainability and aesthetics - and in that order of priority. In other words, nothing should be designed, manufactured and sold until such standards have been reached.
If that could be achieved, we might also see a major shift in the way products are promoted and the type of attitudes to waste that commonly prevail. We need to look no further than prime-time television to see how wasting and wastefulness has become institutionalised in our lifestyles.
Think of the rash of home improvement programmes that hurl tonnes of materials into rubbish skips, as they race against time to get the job done.
The message conveyed is that it's okay to buy new materials, scrap the old ones and bury anything we don't want in a very large pit, for our grandchildren to deal with when we're gone.
Environmental responsibility depends on so many drivers - from product design, to responsible consumption, effective targets and the setting of behavioural norms through, for example, the content of programmes beamed into our homes.
Canterbury's tertiary institutions are demonstrating their natural inclination towards what environmental policy people and Nordic folk refer to "long-termism" - thinking about how our activities today will impact on people in the future - and swinging into action together to scale the waste mountain.
One can only hope that other sectors will start thinking differently too, and set their sights considerably higher than the soft waste targets and non-targets in our current national policy framework.
* Ian Spellerberg is Professor of Conservation at Lincoln University, and chairs the University's Environmental Task Force.
<EM>Ian Spellerberg:</EM> Built-in designs to take out the trash
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