Strategic Objective of Waste Minimisation PPPs

3.
Strategic Objective of Waste Minimisation PPPs

The strategic and operational benefits of PPPs around Waste Minimisation for a municipality in terms of its strategic objectives would include conforming to the waste management hierarchy in any IWMP, addressing waste overload crises, improving environmental performance and saving operation money and time unnecessarily spent on managing waste that could be avoided in the first place.

Benefits include:
• Reduced amount of waste requiring collection and disposal;
• Extended useful life of landfills;
• Money saved through avoided collection and disposal costs;
• Local businesses provided with a service that helps save them money;
• Improved community understanding of the importance of waste reduction and resource conservation efforts.

Before embarking on any waste minimisation initiative a municipality must clearly realize who creates the largest impact with regards to waste generation in the community and therefore set the right strategic objective for waste minimisation. The American Green Grassroot Network organisation (www.ggrn.org) suggests (if a true Life Cycle Analysis approach is followed to evaluate the waste impact of products) that for 1 ton of domestic consumer waste produced an equivalent of 70 tons of waste are on average made by industry (e.g. through minining, agricultural, manufacturing) to make such goods in the first place.

This correlation speaks for itself and identifies the true problem that needs to be addressed by effective municipal waste minimisation programmes - which is inefficient industrial production/commercial operations (in combination with general overconsumption). Both post consumer and post industrial recycling play an important role to reduce the amount of waste landfilled but those interventions alone will not address the problem nearly sufficiently. As has been famously quoted by a leading “Zero Waste to Landfill Campaigner: “Recycling is an aspirin just alleviating a large collective hangover- overconsumption”.

The strategic objective for PPPs around Waste Minimisation would therefore be to make use of beneficial PPPs in order to minimise the amount of waste generated in the first place, as opposed to simply diverting waste for recycling. This could either be a specific PPP for a specific waste minimization action (e.g. education campaign), or planning towards waste minimisation can be included as an aspect of a general waste management PPP.

The latter is very strongly suggested as waste minimisation should really become the overall objective of any waste management PPP.

Public/Private Partnerships for achieving waste minimisation objectives are needed. A feasibility study would need to determine whether a PPP would be able to achieve the specific waste minimization goals cost-effectively, within technical, legal, political & financial limitations. It is common sense to accept that an effective programme that manages to minimize waste in the first place will have significant cost benefits in the long-term, as the cost for managing the waste is often removed, if not significantly reduced, or even leads to income generation through ‘waste’ reuse. The costeffectiveness
of waste minimization programmes are not always simple to ascertain.

In many cases, the money spent on e.g. an education campaign is not directly turned into minimized volumes of waste, and it my take time to see the results.

Sanitary News
http://sanitasinews.blogspot.com
Sumber: Waste Minimisation Section 2.2