is zero waste heading in the wrong direction?

Lately I have been pondering on the term ‘zero waste’ – it’s a neat coin of phrase, a buzzword if you like. It is mainly seen in a positive light, but part of me feels it is also quite deceitful. It reinforces entrenched attitudes, buried deep in our psyche, that waste is something to be shameful of, and eliminated.

And therein lies the rub. Because actually waste is a resource. By adding value to it and transforming it into a useful engine for economic growth and prosperity, whether that’s as renewable energy or secondary materials, it becomes less of a problem – and actually quite sought after.

I remember there was quite a degree of confusion when the term first got aired within the environmental sector. Defra ministers had to clarify that it actually meant ‘zero waste to landfill’ rather than no waste at all. I doubt this lateral thinking has yet filtered down to your average person on the street.

I’m now of the opinion it is quite a lazy term, and does the evolutionary journey of resource management no favours. When a company or organisation boasts of its zero waste status, well, you have to pry a little deeper.

It could well mean they are patting themselves on the back for bypassing the hierarchy and shovelling all of their waste arisings into an incinerator. If that is the case, most of Europe – which hasn’t had the luxury of reliance on landfill – has been zero waste for years.

A more intelligent approach would be to count up, rather than down. If there is waste to deal with, lets not ‘zero’ it but instead embrace the carbon potential and turn it into something bigger, something better. We need to be proud of our waste if we are to attempt to soothe that squirming that instinctively kicks in when we think of the word.

Perhaps it’s a question of language. Here we could learn from Japan. They have not one, but three words for waste – muda, mura, and muri – and they all mean slightly different things. With such subtlety comes deeper reflection and a greater understanding of what we are dealing with.

The one most aligned with our perceptions of waste here in the UK is muda (無駄) as it describes an activity that is wasteful and doesn’t add value, or is unproductive. Think about it, it makes sense doesn’t it? Surely it is muda that our society needs to address, not zero waste.  

cracking the final frontier, the consumer

I spent yesterday dipping in and out of Unilever’s excellent online sustainable living lab, where business and industry leaders were openly discussing the big issues that keep them awake at night.

The great thing about the lab is its interactive nature and I decided to actively engage in the debate as it presented a good opportunity to square up to some of the biggest names driving forward corporate sustainability.

One issue that brand managers seem to be wrestling right now with is sustainable consumption – how to influence and change our purchasing habits for the better, while maintaining healthy profit margins. Not really a marriage made in heaven given our current linear economies.

Marks & Spencer’s head of sustainable business Mike Barry was one of those fielding questions in the lab. He admitted to me that much more work was needed around reconfiguring consumption patterns.

“It’s ultimately getting people to think and behave differently," he said. "Business needs to provide a lead to show consumers that a different approach to consumption can be simple and exciting."

How the likes of M&S navigate this proposition remains to be seen, but Barry felt adopting a more progressive cycle where we become users of products and services, rather than consumers, through leasing-type arrangements, could offer some hope.

In the medium term, he said, this would see global manufacture continue while being supported by localised material recovery and reuse. Longer term the global system itself could be superseded by local manufacture and reuse hubs.

The binding agent needed to make such macro ambition happen is collaboration. It also needs complete buy-in across the value chain, but the final, and perhaps most vital, ingredient is consumer engagement.

Trouble is, carbon concepts tend to be too nebulous to generate the sense of public urgency needed so marketers will need to be creative if they are to engage effectively on this front.

Just last week the Carbon Trust and Coca-Cola published a white paper on personal carbon allowances. Both parties carried out a pilot to see if the idea of giving people a recommended daily carbon allowance, in much the same way as calories, could work in practice.

The findings revealed a real knowledge gap around the hidden cost of carbon. While participants had a good grip of the packaging and transport impacts relating to the goods and services they purchased, embodied emissions left them somewhat clueless. This is a big deal when 40% of emissions attributable to UK consumption occur outside of the UK.

Understanding the lifecycle of carbon and its impacts, and then presenting that to the public in a thought-provoking and digestible way will be challenging to say the least. But it’s a nettle that brand managers need to grasp.

As Barry took stock of his time in the sustainable living lab yesterday, he offered this thought: “Lots of themes, but we keep coming back to the consumer as the next frontier”. Who dares to cross it first could end up altering the dimensions of our buying habits forever.

the zero waste battlefield could get bloody

Many businesses have latched onto the fact that money talks in zero waste terms. It’s smart capitalism – taking what was previously a cost and turning it into a profit centre.

Zero waste will, ultimately, make landfill obsolete. It involves rethinking product lifecycles and goes far beyond recycling, stretching into a landscape covered in scrap carbon. It’s about tracking society’s natural resource flows.

Whether our efforts will be able to eliminate waste entirely from a process remains doubtful, but one thing is certain. Whereas traditional activities were fixed on the front end of resource management – inputs and gate fees – future enterprise will be glued to the back end of these processes, the outputs.

And the higher the value of that output, the more bankable it will be. These exit values will be dependent on feedstock security, site location, market demand for that output, but also on the type of extraction technology used.

Those who are developing sophisticated treatment technologies, clean-tech engineering solutions which have the potential to maximise this scrap carbon and turn it into profit – be it secondary materials or gigajoules of energy – will be onto a winner.

Zero waste still has a valuable role to play at the front end, but I feel that will be more around trying to design it out of a process or supply chain. And where you can’t design it out, you look to capture it instead.

Businesses are now mapping their operations to figure out where waste can be eliminated before it’s created, while finding new uses and markets for everything else. Take Walmart for instance – back in 2009, it tracked 30 waste streams. Now it tracks 138.

What will be interesting is to see how traditional waste companies evolve to take advantage of this shift in resource management. Ultimately, we may be on the cusp of a hijack.

Big corporates and energy companies are already circling in an opportunistic way. When Tesco rolls out its own in-store takeback scheme for electrical goods linked to reward points, you can bet they will take ownership of that material stream too.

For some, zero waste is a perfect brand opportunity. It’s there to be exploited and fought over, especially if it will boost the bottom line.