8 September, 2012 | Publication
Waste prevention is a current policy priority for governments across Europe. It is thus timely that Professor David C Wilson has published a seminal paper, which he also presented at the ISWA Annual Congress last week, reviewing the international evidence base on business waste prevention, in order to underpin policy making. DCW managed the original review on behalf of Defra, the English Environment Ministry, the work being undertaken by a consortium comprising Oakdene Hollins, Brook Lyndhurst and the Resource Recovery Forum.
The paper written by DCW and co-authors was presented at the International Solid Waste association (ISWA)’s Annual Congress in Florence on 18 September, and is published in an open-access special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Waste Management & Research. The papersummarises the scale and benefits of business waste prevention; categorises waste prevention initiatives into four approaches; presents a conceptual framework and uses that to analyse attitudes and behaviours; and providess selected examples to show the effectiveness of eight different types of policy intervention.
The original Defra project was published in February 2012. The results were presented for ease of use as 28 inter-linked modular reports. They can be accessed here (check on ‘search’ and enter ‘WR1403’ as the keyword). The results of the review were showcased at a Defra-WRAPworkshop on 29 February 2012, at which DCW chaired the morning evidence session.
Waste prevention is at the top of the waste hierarchy. The revised EUrevised Waste Framework Directive requires Member States to introduce a national Waste Prevention Programme by December 2013. DCW has been advising Defra (the English Environment Ministry) on their waste and resources evidence programme, and in particular on the evidence relating to waste prevention, since 2004.
The definition of waste prevention used in this evidence review of business waste follows the Directive, including waste avoidance, waste reduction at source or in process and product reuse – recycling is outside the scope. The search for evidence was very broad, covering UK and international, academic and ‘grey’, electronic and printed, and English, French and German language sources dating back at least to 1995. Almost 1,000 relevant documents were identified, of which nearly 600 passed initial screening.
The analysis followed the broad logic of waste prevention actions by business, starting from the basic drivers of legislation and competition. Central to any analysis of the evidence is a detailed examination of the attitudes and behaviours of business. The other two fundamental perspectives used in sorting and assembling the evidence were the particular commercial or industrial sector and the types of intervention to encourage action. A key analytical tool was to characterise the actions that a business can take to prevent waste into a number of approaches.
DCW also managed a previous Defra project, published in October 2009, which reviewed the available evidence on household waste prevention and received an internal Defra award for ‘excellence in the communication of science/engineering to policy makers’. This formed the basis of a special issue of the peer reviewed journal Waste Management & Research, published in March 2010, for which DCW co-wrote the guest editorial and co-authored four papers based on the Defra work.
8 August, 2012 | Publication
Professor David C Wilson is co-author of a research article: Resource management performance in Bahrain: a systematic analysis of municipal waste management, secondary material flows and organizational aspects, published in the August issue of Waste Management & Research, 30 (8) 813-824. The research was undertaken by one of his students, Maram Al Sabbagh, using the methodology for profiling waste management originally developed by DCW and colleagues for UN-Habitat. Bahrain fills a gap in both the geographical and income level coverage of the previous sample of 20 cities.
8 May, 2012 | Publication
Professor David C Wilson is co-author of two recently published original research articles on cost estimation and cost function analysis for waste management in developing countries. DCW has been working for several years as an external supervisor with Shantha Parthan, a PhD student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Shantha’s research is on improved cost planning for municipal solid waste management in developing countries, where problems are severe, expectations for improvements are high, but finances are constrained.
One paper is Cost estimation for solid waste management in industrialising regions – Precedents, problems and prospects, published in the March 2012 issue of the journal Waste Management, 32(3) 584–594, which examines alternative approaches used in both industrialised and industrialising countries. The other is Cost function analysis for solid waste management: a developing country experience, published in the May 2012 issue of Waste Management & Research, 30(5) 485–491, which explores the potential use of cost functions, using as a case study an extensive data set covering some 300 Indian cities.
8 April, 2012 | Waste Management
Sustainable solid waste management (SWM) is a challenge to most local and national governments in developing countries. The German Technical Cooperation Agency – GIZ has recently launched a 3-year programme to develop pilot projects and guidance materials to fill specific gaps in the knowledge base on sustainable SWM. The study focusing on the delivery of waste management services (‘operator models’) has been commissioned to ERM and Wasteaware – Professor David C Wilson is global advisor and lead analyst in the project team.
UPDATE 03 March 2014: The final Operator Model reports have now been published.
Past experience has shown that there is no such thing as ‘a standard operator model’. Contexts in which the various solid waste management systems exist and operate vary diversely. The team will collect and analyse case study experiences in various low- and middle-income countries and different areas along the waste chain to identify what works under which circumstances. The case studies will be analysed in terms of:
– What services are provided?
– Who provides those services and under what conditions?
– How are the services managed, supervised and paid for? and
– At what (geographical) level are the services provided?
The results will be presented in a ‘source book’ and guidance paper to assist decision-makers in selecting the most appropriate and efficient model (or mix of models) for service delivery in any particular local situation.
8 April, 2012 | Waste Management
Professor David C Wilson is an invited speaker at this week’s International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) 2nd Waste & Climate Beacon Conference in Copenhagen, 19-20 April,2012. DCW’s topic is ‘Comparing Solid Waste Management in the World’s Cities’, and combines two major strands of his current work: looking at SWM around the world and in developing countries in particular; and promoting waste prevention as a major component of resource management as the next phase in modernising SWM in developed countries. The latter also builds on his particular interest in food waste prevention. DCW’s full presentation is now on the conference website.
This conference will focus ISWA’s work to bring waste management firmly onto the agenda for UN COP18 on climate change in Qatar later in 2012, a process which began at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. End-of-pipe waste management contributes 3-5% to global emissions of greenhouse gases, but both waste prevention and recycling have the potential for reducing global emissions by perhaps 15-20%. Waste management has already made strides in cutting emissions of methane (25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) from landfill. But 20% of the UK’s carbon footprint is accounted for by the food we eat – and up to 50% of our food is either wasted before it gets to the kitchen or is bought and thrown away without being eaten. So eliminating avoidable food waste would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 5-10% – which compares to the total contribution of end-of-pipe waste management of 3-5%.
