Journal
Waste Stream Mapping: Overview and Concepts
In this report I present a general overview of waste, general definitions and challenges, the result of waste streams mapping and ways forward.
Please note that having a complete map of all waste streams is not viable given the complexity, lack of transparency from the waste management providers and the scale of the subject. This report aims to clarify some of the concepts and draw a picture of how things currently work. We hope it sets out the basis for further research and identifies the relevant leverage points to intervene.
This work has been made for FoodFutures and the Closing Loops project. Please note that it is free to use and distribute, but credits should be given to the researcher and the organisation, please cite as: Frausin, V. (2023). FoodFutures: The Closing Loops Project. Waste Stream Mapping Work, Unpublished.
Overview
“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.”
Being wasteful is not inborn. The waste crisis is not a personal failure, nor is it an accident. The current wasteful culture is recent, manmade and requires an economic, social, physical and political infrastructure to survive. We made it, we constantly maintain it, let’s change it. As Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay say in their 2011 book What We Leave Behind: “If it can’t be reused, recycled and composted, it should not be made”.
Waste does not exist in nature, just look at the forest food system and its complex cycle of nutrient recycling that involves many creatures from bacteria to vultures.
However, the industrial culture produces toxic waste that is expected to be accommodated and assimilated by the natural world, with negative impacts on the environment and human health, causing pollution and harm to humans and wildlife communities, as well as contaminating soil, water, and air.
According to the latest report on waste by the World Bank Group, globally, about 37 percent of waste is disposed of in some type of landfill, 33 percent is openly dumped, 19 percent undergoes materials recovery through recycling and composting, and 11 percent is treated through modern incineration (Kaza et al., 2018). And meanwhile waste production has not peaked (see for example The World Counts, 2023).
In 2018, the UK produced a total of 222.2 million tonnes of waste, with England responsible for 84% of it. The waste came from various sources: Commercial and Industrial Waste (C&I) made up 19.75%, Construction, Demolition and Excavation (CD&E) made up 62%, households made up 12%, and the rest came from other sources. Out of the total waste generated, 48.7% was recycled or recovered in some way. 22.8% was sent to landfill, 11.5% was treated and released into bodies of water, 7.5% was used for backfilling or engineering purposes, 4% was incinerated to generate energy-from-waste, and the remaining 3% was incinerated without energy recovery(1).
Lancaster District
A local government district of Lancashire, England. It covers the city of Lancaster, the towns of Morecambe, Heysham, and Carnforth, as well as outlying villages, farms and rural hinterland. It covers an area of 567 km2, with a population of 142,934, making it 0.3% of England’s total population.
According to the 2020-2021 report by The Waste and Resources Action
Programme (WRAP), Lancaster’s performance is below the national average (see diagram 1).
For every ton of waste produced by consumers (post-consumption), 20 tons of waste is produced in the extraction process alone” (Meadows and Randers, 2004). Although more attention is paid to Municipal Solid Waste, more waste is generated at the extraction and production than in the post-consumer stage.
But, what is waste?
There is no common definition of “waste” across or within countries, “leaving space to adapt it for particular interests, complicating and obstructing “efforts to enhance transparency about wastes and their movements to improve global governance” (O’Neill, 2019 Loc. 821).
In the UK, waste is defined legally as “any substance or object which the holder discards or intends or is required to discard”, derived from the EU Waste Framework Directive. This definition limits the scope, disregarding waste as a set of socio-ecological relationships. It creates an inaccurate framing of wasting practices, fostering toxic narratives that make waste appear as an accident of the production/ consumption culture, rather than an effect by design, naturalising responses that reproduce the generation of waste instead of challenging production in the first place.
The legal definition in the UK of waste management is the collection, transport, recovery (including sorting), and disposal of waste, including the supervision of such operations and the after-care of disposal sites, and including actions taken as a dealer or broker.
Waste hierarchy
The waste hierarchy (2) shall apply as a priority order in waste prevention and management legislation and policy. It outlines the preferred methods for managing and handling waste to minimise environmental impact.
At the top is elimination of waste. This could be through campaigns to stop unnecessary
packaging, or the production of disposable electronics for instance. Reduce and reuse are also
in the top layers. It is these top three green layers where most focus should be when it comes to transformative solutions. However much of the focus on waste management focussed on the lower three segments. Recycling is preferable to recovery (the process of reclaiming or reusing materials or energy from waste that would otherwise be discarded) and disposal, which refers to landfill, waterways/ocean dumping (e.g. untreated sewage), export, littering and fly-tipping.
However, recycling is not an eternal circular material flow. It is a waste producer industry that involves transport, virgin materials and energy loss. Whatever waste is recycled will almost certainly – and typically after only one recycle – turn into waste that will be transported to a landfill or incinerator.
Waste infrastructure – who and what goes into managing waste:
- Peoples’ time whether paid or unpaid
- Fleets of collection vehicles
- Waste transfer stations
- Materials recovery facilities
- Technologies that attend to residual waste Incineration with/without energy recovery
- MBT (mechanical/biological treatment) plants
- Landfills
- More virgin materials to mix with materials – particularly plastics
How waste is measured
The unit of measurement for waste can vary depending on the type of waste being measured. For example, in the UK liquid waste is measured in metric units such as millilitres or litres, solid waste is measured in metric units such as tonne and greenhouse gas emissions are usually measured in metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).
Measuring waste in metric units rather than its social and environmental impacts, and overlooking it as the result of socio-ecological relationships, frames it as a technical problem demanding technical solutions. A good example is The Ocean Cleanup array(3), designed to clean plastics from the ocean, but a large body of research shows that it damages and kills marine life and it doesn’t challenge the structures that produced the plastic waste in the first place(4,5). It is not the plastics in the ocean that have created the ecological crisis, but the socio-ecological relationships that lead to the production of plastic waste.
Collection of data
“A system of accounting that can’t count what matters.”
In the UK, wastes are generated from various sources, classified into household, commercial and industrial (C&I), and construction, demolition and excavation (CD&E). Collection and discard of household waste is the responsibility of local authorities, as well as the duty to report the types and quantities of wastes on WasteDataFlow, a web-based system of public access (DEFRA, 2021).
Waste Data Flow doesn’t include industrial, medical, hazardous, electronic, construction and demolition, and waste-related transportation.
The collection and discard of C&I and CD&E wastes are dealt in an open market of trade waste contractors. Although local authorities can enter as a contender, most contracts are managed by private sector companies (DEFRA, 2021). In theory they should report on types and quantities but in reality this works on a voluntary basis due to an exemption from Section 43 of the Freedom of Information Act (ICO, 2023). This make C&I and CD&E information far from transparent and incomplete(6) (see diagram 2).
Local authorities – using our tax revenue(7) – have the responsibility to deal with kerbside from households, bulky collection, bring banks, household waste recycling centres (HWRC)(8), along with the duty of waste on highways and roads, streets, parks and grounds, the clearance of fly-tipping materials, beaches and a separated system for healthcare waste and in some cases commercial collections.
In North Lancashire, the city council collects and Lancashire county council disposes. Most municipal waste should actually be considered industrial waste that has been externalised to consumers in the form of packaging, disposable items and poor quality goods. Individual households are then held responsible for sorting and recycling with unpaid labour. Waste and recycling companies then get the waste back from municipalities, paid for through public taxes. Given that collection, sorting, storage and disposal of domestic waste is the responsibility of local authorities, hence with the taxes that citizens pay, municipal solid waste acts as a subsidy to the manufacturer of disposable products.
A regulatory mechanism called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)(9) has been implemented to make those that “produce waste”(sellers and manufacturers) responsible for the cost of managing the end-of-life phase. In the UK, EPR is already in place on packaging, electrical and electronic equipment (EEE), batteries and end of life vehicles (ELVs). Other waste streams, textiles included, are being proposed.
The challenges
There is not a clear definition of “waste”, not by chance “Dumping pollutants into the air, water and soil meanwhile still continues, more or less of it depending on how much one can get past current regulations” (Nielsen and Lederman 2013, 891).
Wastes are measured by metric units rather than its social and environmental impacts, So when measuring waste, a tonne of food waste despite being biodegradable is equivalent to a tonne of plastic bags for example.
Data available is mainly on solid municipal waste, attributing social and environmental crises related to waste to citizen behaviour, population growth, and unsustainable waste management practices by the global poor.
Lack of transparency: Commercial and industrial (C&I) waste and Construction, demolition and excavation (CD&E) waste are protected by commercial confidentiality, making it impossible to know how much waste they are actually producing.
Waste is defined as a technical problem demanding technical solutions, dismissing the socio-ecological relationships that create it.
Waste generated by transportation is not taken into account, despite the fact that we live in a culture that relies on a long distance of transport of people, raw materials, finished products and waste ( including sending waste to the future).
What are waste streams?
Waste streams are flows of specific waste from source to disposal. They could be segmented by type – such as liquids, solids, or gaseous, by material – plastics, glass, metals, wood, paper, textiles, bio-waste, or by product – packaging, electronics, batteries, end-of-life vehicles and so on (see diagram 3).
As well as the definition of waste, there is not an agreement on what “source to disposal” means. Source as the place where it came from can be interpreted as wide as the original source (water, soil, nature for example) to the supplier (shop, company and so on). Disposal could be understood as water, air or soil (nature) to the bin to be collected by the waste company.
Key question
When considering alternatives for the Closing Loops project, it is important to take into account this discrepancy in the definitions of source and disposal. It is key to determine if a “solution” is respecting planetary resources such as oil, metal, clean air and water or closing the loops for technical purposes limited to circulating values for the industry with the aim of profit rather than of care for the natural and social world.
Government webpages
Government web pages:
References
Armiero, M. (2021) ‘Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump’, Elements in Environmental Humanities [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108920322.
DEFRA (2021) Local Authority Waste statistics – Recycling measures. Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1040759/Recycling_Explainer_202021_6Dec2021_accessible.pdf (Accessed: 4 November 2023).
ICO (2023) Section 43 – Commercial interests, Information Commissioner’s Office. ICO. Available at: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guidance-index/freedom-of-information-and-environmental-information-regulations/section-43-commercial-interests/ (Accessed: 11 April 2023).
Nielsen, Lisbeth, and Zohar Lederman. 2013. “A New Environmental Ethics – The Next Millennium for Life of Earth by Holmes Rolston III (Review)
O’Neill, K. (2019) Waste. Polity Press.
The World Counts (2023) Global Waste Problem. Available at: https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/waste/global-waste-problem (Accessed: 19 April 2023).
Kaza, S. et al. (2018) What a Waste 2.0. World Bank Group. Available at: https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/ (Accessed: 11 April 2023).
Additional Notes:
6. “from disclosure for information which is a trade secret or whose disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any legal person (an individual, a company, the public authority itself or any other legal entity)” (ICO, 2023) which means that disclosing data is voluntary and getting a real figure on how much waste are industries generating is impossible.
7. In England, a waste collection authority (in practice this is normally the district, metropolitan or city council; or unitary authority), has a duty to collect household waste, under section 45 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, as amended (EPA 1990) Household waste collection in England and Wales (parliament.uk)
8. Sometimes subcontracted to private companies, the one in white Lund Lancaster is managed by SUEZ for example.
9. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a new piece of legislation in the UK that will help deliver the UK Government and the Devolved Administrations commitment to protecting the environment by reforming the existing Packaging Waste Regulations to include making producers responsible for the full net cost of managing packaging once it becomes waste. Extended Producer Responsibility (biffa.co.uk)