Stuff: Time to shine a light on waste

Read the original article on Stuff

The Surrealists thought landfills were a society’s subconscious. In dreams, the experiences we have tried to suppress come bubbling up from the depths. In rubbish dumps, society attempts to cast things off and forget the costs of its own pollution; but still, like a nightmare, the garbage rises.

Sometimes landfills explode, strewing trailer-loads of rubbish across pristine coasts and waterways, as happened in 2019 near the Fox River. And the wider problem has begun to press itself onto our conscious mind.

According to the annual Kantar opinion poll, no fewer than three pollution-related issues – plastic build-up, excess waste, and over-packaging – are in the public’s top 10 concerns. We’re slowly acknowledging that we are, quite simply, rubbish at rubbish.

New Zealand generates 781kg of municipal waste per person; only two developed countries have a worse record. Just one-quarter of our waste is recycled or otherwise repurposed. Some 13 million tonnes annually – 760 Interislander ferries filled to the brim – is dumped, a colossal squandering of resources that have been ripped from the earth, used perhaps once or twice, and thrown away.

The results can be seen on beaches littered with coffee-cup lids, plastic bags and bin liners. Rubbish pollutes our shores, leaches into the soil, chokes turtles and dolphins.

And if the end state of these objects is bad, the start is no better: around half the world’s climate-change-inducing emissions are generated in making things, the Ellen Macarthur Foundation estimates. We continuously breach our planet’s boundaries – and the things we consume play a large part in that grim story.

Recycling, the most commonly touted solution, is useful, but won’t by itself save us. Don’t get me wrong: I love recycling. It’s in the blood: my grandmother, Kae Miller, spent part of the 1970s living on the Porirua tip in protest against the lack of recycling. But it’s still a process in which energy and materials are lost.

We need to embrace the wider suite of measures wrapped up in what’s known as the circular economy, a concept set to define the coming decades. It valorises products that are durable and reusable, objects with a life after their initial purpose, items that can circulate multiple times. It is a recipe for simply bringing less stuff into existence.

We can embrace the circular economy as individuals, and in families and communities, by finding sources of pleasure that don’t involve buying things. Where we do have to buy them, and where budgets allow, we can choose better made, more durable objects. (Or renovated ones: I’m typing this column on a refurbished ex-business laptop that runs beautifully.)

We’ve all acclimatised to taking our own shopping bags to the supermarket. In future we’ll carry more such receptacles: Keep Cups for coffee, Tupperware for takeaways. It’s not just things themselves that should be re-used but also their packaging.

We must also, however, act collectively to change the laws and regulations that shape our choices, so that those rules make it easy for us to do the right thing while punishing people who would keep exploiting the planet.

The first step is to place most responsibility where it lies best: with the manufacturers. They need to be made product “stewards”, responsible for an item’s life from conception to disposal.

Too many products are a fused plastic shell, the mechanical parts hidden inside, inaccessible to a would-be repairer. In response, several states have introduced right-to-repair schemes, forcing companies to make easily fixable products, stock spare parts for up to a decade, and stop requiring consumers to get items repaired at expensive, company-linked shops.

People are still unlikely to get their toaster fixed, though, if it’s cheaper to buy a new one. And that points to a wider problem: our economic system doesn’t properly recognise the value in extending products’ lives, nor the damage done by unnecessary waste.

One solution is to change the price of those actions. Some Austrian cities hand out vouchers that give individuals 50% off the cost of fixing goods (up to a few hundred dollars). The Swedes provide tax breaks for repairs.

Such initiatives could be funded by increasing tip fees and levies on manufacturers. We could also reintroduce container deposit schemes – the old “20c for every bottle you return” initiatives that New Zealand once employed and which have slashed plastic-vessel pollution in other countries.

In this new world, polluters would start to bear the social and environmental costs of their actions, while firms would see more financial value in re-using items. Jobs making stuff would be replaced with jobs repairing stuff.

The Ministry for the Environment, which has already proposed several circular-economy initiatives, needs to keep its resolve, and make them reality. For too long, waste has been near-invisible. Bringing it back into the light may prove to be one of the most revolutionary economic changes we could have ever made.