What would it mean to be dealing with London‘s waste ’efficiently'?
Take food waste for example. The food wasted in rich countries is equal to the entire food production of sub-Saharan Africa. London is making a big contribution to this scandolous waste. The causes of food losses and waste in London and other cities of medium/high-income countries mainly relate to consumer behaviour as well as to a lack of coordination between different actors in the supply chain. Farmer-buyer sales agreements may contribute to quantities of farm crops being wasted. Food can be wasted due to quality standards, which reject food items not perfect in shape or appearance. At the consumer level, insufficient purchase planning and expiring ‘best-before-dates’ also cause large amounts of waste, in combination with the careless attitude of those consumers who can afford to waste food. Analyses of this food waste can be found in this report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.
What can we mean by “Efficiency”? Generally it refers to the relationship between inputs and outputs: how much effort goes in, and what you get out. A more efficient system is where fewer inputs are required for a given level of output. An ‘efficient’ waste management system is thus one which requires fewer resources - money, people, land, energy and so forth - to deal with how ever many tonnes of waste there are.
Typically, the quest for a most efficient system is the quest for an optimal solution, balancing trade offs among unequal factors. In the case of London's waste, the factors include:
Local versus regional solutions - tailoring waste services to local circumstances could be more efficient because it increases the likelihood that any given community (residential or business) will participate in those services; conversely, there may be inefficiencies because multiple different solutions have to be devised across a patchwork of locations. A single, region-wide solution might be more efficient in terms of reaping economies of scale, but may fail to engage with different users.
Technologies - a particular processing technology may be more efficient, but may imply a less efficient collection method; or a technology that seems efficient now may rapidly become less efficient as the relative costs of other factors change.
Private, public and community sectors - waste management solutions that, for example, give priority to the community sector may be more efficient at separating material streams, and may generate greater employment, but may appear more expensive in the short term and thus appear ‘inefficient’; the private sector may appear more efficient than the public sector because it is able to perform certain operations at lower cost, but it may simply be that the private sector is focused more narrowly and is not taking into account wider social or environmental issues. Efficiency is not merely financial - we may wish to consider ‘social’ or ‘environmental’ efficiency - and efficiency may not be the only objective: what about fairness or equality?
Regulation, price and exhortation - which is the most efficient way of prompting desired behaviour? Regulation may be efficient because it simply proscribes certain behaviours; the price mechanism may be efficient because it enables individual economic actors to make their own choices about how to respond to price signals; exhortation or persuasion may be more efficient because it engenders changes in social norms. But how do they interact? Might efficiencies in one sphere promote inefficiencies in another?
Tonnes of stuff or tonnes of carbon - is it more efficient to focus on tonnes of material, or tonnes of carbon? Does it vary between different materials? If focusing on tonnes of material, is the mix of technologies, sectors and geographies that is ‘most efficient’ different from if the focus is upon carbon?
Drivers of change - the various factors influencing the amount of waste - levels of consumption, production techniques, collection methodologies and so forth - may be changing at different speeds and/or having differential impacts on the scale and composition of waste. What is the most efficient way to monitor and manage these drivers and their consequences for waste management?
Materials & service provision - how do different collection and processing techniques interact with different materials? A more efficient method for - for example - collecting and processing food waste may mean inefficiencies in the collection and treatment of paper and card. How do movements in the relative prices of different materials (both in terms of recyclates and their non-recyclate alternatives) feed through into the efficiency or otherwise of how different waste streams are managed?
Municipal and commercial waste - the long-standing distinction between municipal and commercial waste would appear to be inefficient, because it reduces the scope for economies of scale. Conversely, by distinguishing between possible supply chains of material for reprocessing, it may make it easier to plan collection and processing methods, thus improving efficiency.
