Waste not, want not: recycling, value chains, and value change
Do we have enough waste?’ asks Priya Saikumar, OCS member, DPhil candidate, and volunteer at this month’s Café Scientifique, a global community providing a public forum for discussion between “scientists” and “non-scientists”.
She was asking Dr Marcus Gover, former CEO of WRAP–the Waste and Resources Action Programme–and guest speaker at the Oxford Café, whose talk revisited what many of us take for granted: the matter of waste (and why waste matters).
Only somewhat joking, Saikumar zeroed in on the difficulties of incentivising investment into effective waste management, a topic pertinent to her research on resource sufficiency and circular economy strategies.
After setting up, I sat amongst Café regulars, undergraduate and foundation-year students, and current academics, all of whom, regardless of levels of technicality, asked about the future of plastic recycling and importantly, what behaviours we should adapt and adopt to join the campaign.
So, why does waste matter? Grover’s select array of statistics did much of the heavy lifting on this point. ‘The UK alone contributes 200 million tonnes (mT) of waste per year’, he began, in other words, 3mT each. While a lot of this is inert and can be recycled, most ends up in landfills and just 14% is household waste, meaning a significant proportion is commercial industrial waste (sludge).
What struck me was the amount of work behind the scenes. The reported numbers, obviously, are not random. It is the endeavour of NGOs such as WRAP to commission surveys, which involve sampling from rubbish collections and recycling points, and then recording the waste. However, as stressed by Grover, recycling is not the be-all-and-end-all. After all, there would be less waste to manage if we produced less waste in the first place.
Saikumar’s query of waste quantity, while laced with humour and seemingly counterintuitive, spoke to a real issue faced in waste management present at different scales, from regional, to national and international. For investment into economies of waste, there needs to be sufficient supply. Similarly, in response to my question about the future promises of modified bacteria, Grover indicated the need for investment both into the technology, and into ensuring systems are equipped for implementation.
Of course, the talk concluded with the prevalent issue of plastic waste. Abuzz in the news with talks of microplastics obstructing blood vessels in mice brains, health debates surrounding black plastic kitchen utensils, and even the potential for the ‘bio-upcycling of plastics’ by engineering enzymes, the Global Plastic Treaty negotiations in Busan, South Korea last November indicate systemic change. While widely presented as a ‘failure’, Grover painted a different picture. In fact, he asserted many parties stood firm: the proposed agreement was just not good enough, meeting neither demands, nor ambitions.
In true Café Scientifique fashion, both audience and speaker were engaged in a common issue: what strategies and incentives are needed for a circular economy? Evidently, there is far more to discarded materials than ‘out of sight, out of mind’. In the most literal sense, it pays to remember this.
Written by Ushika Kidd