Talking rubbish

A special report on waste February 28th 2009

Waste.indd 1Waste.indd 1 17/2/09 15:56:2017/2/09 15:56:20

The Economist February 28th 2009 A special report on waste 1

Environmental worries have transformed the waste industry, saysEdward McBride. But governments’ policies remain largely incoherent

businesses makes up just 24% of the total(see chart 1, next page). In addition, bothdeveloped and developing countries gen­erate vast quantities of construction anddemolition debris, industrial e�uent,mine tailings, sewage residue and agricul­tural waste. Extracting enough gold tomake a typical wedding ring, for example,can generate three tonnes of mining waste.

Out of sight, out of mindRubbish may be universal, but it is littlestudied and poorly understood. Nobodyknows how much of it the world generatesor what it does with it. In many rich coun­tries, and most poor ones, only the patchi­est of records are kept. That may be under­standable: by de�nition, waste is some­thing its owner no longer wants or takesmuch interest in.

Ignorance spawns scares, such as thefuss surrounding New York’s infamousgarbage barge, which in 1987 sailed the At­lantic for six months in search of a place todump its load, giving many Americans thefalse impression that their country’s land­�lls had run out of space. It also makes ithard to draw up sensible policies: justthink of the endless debate about whetherrecycling is the only way to save the plan­et�or an expensive waste of time.

Rubbish can cause all sorts of pro­blems. It often stinks, attracts vermin andcreates eyesores. More seriously, it can re­

Talking rubbish

THE stretch of the Paci�c between Ha­waii and California is virtually empty.

There are no islands, no shipping lanes, nohuman presence for thousands of miles�just sea, sky and rubbish. The prevailingcurrents cause �otsam from around theworld to accumulate in a vast becalmedpatch of ocean. In places, there are a mil­lion pieces of plastic per square kilometre.That can mean as much as 112 times moreplastic than plankton, the �rst link in themarine food chain. All this adds up to per­haps 100m tonnes of �oating garbage, andmore is arriving every day.

Wherever people have been�andsome places where they have not�theyhave left waste behind. Litter lines theworld’s roads; dumps dot the landscape;slurry and sewage slosh into rivers andstreams. Up above, thousands of frag­ments of defunct spacecraft careenthrough space, and occasionally more de­bris is produced by collisions such as theone that destroyed an American satellite inmid­February. Ken Noguchi, a Japanesemountaineer, estimates that he has collect­ed nine tonnes of rubbish from the slopesof Mount Everest during �ve clean­up ex­peditions. There is still plenty left.

The average Westerner produces over500kg of municipal waste a year�and thatis only the most obvious portion of therich world’s discards. In Britain, for exam­ple, municipal waste from households and

An audio interview with the author is at

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A list of sources is at

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You are what you throw awayThe anthropology of garbage. Page 2

Down in the dumpsManaging waste properly is expensive, whichis why rich countries mostly do it better thanpoor ones. Page 3

A better holeThe charms of modern land�lls. Page 5

The appliance of scienceTrash goes high­tech. Page 6

Round and round it goesRecycling is good for the environment, but itcosts. Is it worth it? Page 8

Muck and brassThe waste business smells of money. Page 10

Less is moreThe ultimate in waste disposal is to tackle theproblem at source. Page 12

Also in this section

AcknowledgmentsIn addition to those mentioned in the text, the authorwould like to thank the following for their help in thepreparation of this report: Sarah Brown and Katie Zabel ofthe Waste Resources Action Programme; Vera Carley ofCovanta Energy; Nick Cli�e of Closed Loop Recycling; BethHerzfeld of Greenpeace; Kevin Hurst of VeoliaEnvironmental Services; Bruce Jenkyn­Jones of ImpaxAsset Management; Jyoti Mhapsekar of Stree MuktiSanghatana; Nick Nuttal of UNEP; Robert Reed of NorcalWaste Systems; Ed Skernolis of the National RecyclingCoalition; and M. Subashini of the Indian HighCommission, London

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More articles about the environment are at

www.economist.com/environment

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lease harmful chemicals into the soil andwater when dumped, or into the air whenburned. It is the source of almost 4% of theworld’s greenhouse gases, mostly in theform of methane from rotting food�andthat does not include all the methane gen­erated by animal slurry and other farmwaste. And then there are some really nas­ty forms of industrial waste, such as spentnuclear fuel, for which no universally ac­cepted disposal methods have thus farbeen developed.

Yet many also see waste as an opportu­nity. Getting rid of it all has become a hugeglobal business. Rich countries spendsome $120 billion a year disposing of theirmunicipal waste alone and another $150billion on industrial waste, according toCyclOpe, a French research institute. Theamount of waste that countries producetends to grow in tandem with their econo­mies, and especially with the rate of ur­banisation. So waste �rms see a rich futurein places such as China, India and Brazil,which at present spend only about $5 bil­lion a year collecting and treating their mu­nicipal waste.

Waste also presents an opportunity in agrander sense: as a potential resource.

Much of it is already burned to generateenergy. Clever new technologies to turn itinto fertiliser or chemicals or fuel are beingdeveloped all the time. Visionaries see a fu­ture in which things like household rub­bish and pig slurry will provide the fuel forcars and homes, doing away with the needfor dirty fossil fuels. Others imagine aworld without waste, with rubbish beingroutinely recycled. As Bruce Parker, thehead of the National Solid Wastes Manage­ment Association (NSWMA), an American

industry group, puts it, �Why �sh bodiesout of the river when you can stop themjumping o� the bridge?�

Until last summer such views werespreading quickly. Entrepreneurs werequeuing up to scour rubbish for anythingthat could be recycled. There was even talkof mining old land�lls to extract steel andaluminium cans. And waste that could notbe recycled should at least be used to gen­erate energy, the evangelists argued. Abrave new wasteless world seemed nigh.

But since then plummeting prices forvirgin paper, plastic and fuels, and hencealso for the waste that substitutes for them,have put an end to such visions. Many ofthe recycling �rms that had argued rubbishwas on the way out now say that unlessthey are given �nancial help, they them­selves will disappear.

Subsidies are a bad idea. Governmentshave a role to play in the business of wastemanagement, but it is a regulatory and su­pervisory one. They should oblige peoplewho create waste to clean up after them­selves and ideally ensure that the price ofany product re�ects the cost of disposingof it safely. That would help to signalwhich items are hardest to get rid of, giving

1Who’s the messiest?

Source: Institution of Mechanical Engineers

UK waste, 2006

%

Household11

Commercial13

Industrial10

Construction &demolition 36Agriculture 1

Sewage 1

Mining &quarrying28

WASTE can be a revelation. Excava­tions of old rubbish tips (or mid­

dens, as archaeologists call them) providemuch of our knowledge of everyday lifein the past. Many ancient civilisationspiled up mountains of garbage. At a spotin America called Pope’s Creek, on theshores of the Potomac river, oyster shellsdiscarded by the pre­Columbian inhabit­ants cover an area of 30 acres (12 hectares)to an average depth of ten feet. Enormousshell middens can be found all over theworld, wherever ancient migrants cameacross handy oyster and mussel beds.

Archaeologists have found papyrusesinscribed with parts of lost plays by Soph­ocles and Euripides in a Greco­Romanrubbish tip in Egypt. The same site, nearthe ancient town of Oxyrhynchus, yield­ed a wealth of 2,000­year­old invoices, re­ceipts, tax returns and other documents.

Modern waste can be equally enlight­ening. Dustbins generally provide a more

honest account of their owners’ behav­iour than do the owners themselves. A re­search programme at the University of Ar­izona conducted several studiescomparing the participants’ own assess­ments of their habits with the record pro­vided by their rubbish. It turned out thatpeople wasted much more food than theyrealised, claimed to cook from scratchmore often than they really did and atemore junk food and less virtuous stu�than they admitted. For example, theyoverestimated their consumption of liverby 200%. A survey on consumption of redmeat was particularly telling. Rich house­holds, perhaps wanting to be seen to beeating healthily, claimed to consume lessof it than they did, whereas poor ones,possibly indulging in wishful thinking,claimed to eat more.

The project uncovered many otheroddities of human behaviour. For exam­ple, a well­publicised shortage of a partic­

ular product actually causes people tothrow more of it away, perhaps becausethey have bought too much of it. Similarly,a public campaign to get people to takehazardous waste to special collectionpoints makes them put more of it in thebin. Such campaigns seem to promptthem to have a clear­out but they often donot make it to the collection point.

Don’t ask, digWaste can be used to determine with greataccuracy how many people are living in aparticular place, how old they are, howmuch they earn and which ethnic groupthey come from. America’s Census Bu­reau has toyed with the idea of using dataderived from analyses of household rub­bish to adjust its survey data. America’sSupreme Court has also acknowledgedthe importance of waste, ruling that po­lice may rummage through trash left outfor collection without a warrant.

The anthropology of garbageYou are what you throw away

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consumers an incentive to buy goods thatcreate less waste in the �rst place.

That may sound simple enough, butgovernments seldom get the rules right. Inpoorer countries they often have no rulesat all, or if they have them they fail to en­force them. In rich countries they are ofteninconsistent: too strict about some sorts ofwaste and worryingly lax about others.They are also prone to imposing arbitrarytargets and taxes. California, for example,wants to recycle all its trash not because itnecessarily makes environmental or eco­nomic sense but because the goal of �zero

waste� sounds politically attractive. Brit­ain, meanwhile, has started taxing land�llsso heavily that local o�cials, desperate to�nd an alternative, are investing in allmanner of unproven waste­processingtechnologies.

As for recycling, it is useless to urge peo­ple to salvage stu� for which there are nobuyers. If �rms are passing up easy oppor­tunities to reduce greenhouse­gas emis­sions by re­using waste, then governmentshave set the price of emissions too low.They would do better to deal with that pro­blem directly than to try to regulate away

the repercussions. At the very least, gov­ernments should make sure there are mar­kets for the materials they want collected.

This special report will argue that, byand large, waste is being better managedthan it was. The industry that deals with itis becoming more e�cient, the technol­ogies are getting more e�ective and thepollution it causes is being controlled moretightly. In some places less waste is beingcreated in the �rst place. But progress isslow because the politicians who are try­ing to in�uence what we discard and whatwe keep often make a mess of it. 7

THERE are really only three things youcan do with waste: bury it, burn it or re­

cycle it. All of them carry environmentaland �nancial costs, and all require carefulmanagement. At �rst sight burying orburning the stu� seem the simplest op­tions, but the potentially hazardous conse­quences require strict controls, as this sec­tion will show. Recycling, which is a highlycomplicated business, will be dealt with ina later section.

The very idea that waste needs to be�managed� is relatively new. Throughoutmuch of human history waste took care ofitself, and in many parts of the world it stilldoes. In poor agricultural societies there isnot much of it to begin with. Broken toolsand worn clothes are repaired, food scrapsare fed to livestock and so on. In suchplaces waste is seen as having an inherentvalue. The reason why plastic bags blowabout by the roadsides in so many poorcountries, says Philippe Chalmin of theUniversité Paris Dauphine, is not that thelocal people are litterbugs but that they arefrugal enough not to need a waste­collec­tion system of any sort. Plastic bags areamong the few items they cannot recycle.

Waste �rst became a problem in cities,where it accumulated faster than it rottedaway, creating an eyesore and a health haz­ard. In 1552 Shakespeare’s father was �neda shilling for leaving excrement in thestreet instead of taking it to the designatedspot at the edge of town. Benjamin Frank­lin helped to set up America’s �rst street­cleaning service in Philadelphia in 1757. Buteven in cities most items that would nowbe considered rubbish were collected and

put to use. Human and animal droppingswere gathered up and spread on �elds asfertiliser. Rags were used to make paper.

Anything that had no further use was,and still is, burned or buried. To beginwith, dumps were simply places wherewaste was left to rot with little or no treat­ment. At best, a layer of dirt or debris wasspread over the decaying rubbish to helpcontrol smells and vermin, a techniqueadopted by the inhabitants of Knossos inCrete in about 3000BC.

The amount of waste a communitygenerates tends to grow with its economy(see chart 2). Thus America produces over700kg of municipal waste per person eachyear, compared with Nairobi’s 220kg. Thericher people get, the more paper, plasticand metals they chuck out, so the propor­tion of food waste goes down. Ash tends todisappear from household waste altogeth­er as electricity and gas replace coal­ andwood­�red boilers and stoves.

Buried, not goneThe increased volume of waste going toland�ll causes several problems. The �rstone is to �nd enough space for it. Somecountries have no trouble with that: Amer­ica’s existing land�lls, for example, have 20years’ worth of capacity left, according toNSWMA, the industry group. The formerFresh Kills land�ll in New York, at 12 squarekilometres (�ve square miles), is theworld’s biggest man­made structure,dwar�ng Egypt’s pyramids. But in denselypopulated countries such as Singapore, orin mountainous places such as Japan, �nd­ing an appropriate site can be hard.

Even where plenty of land is available,locals are often hostile to land�lls becauseof the damage they can do to humanhealth and to the environment. Denselypacked organic matter produces methaneas it rots, which can catch �re or cause ex­plosions. That is also bad for the atmo­sphere, because methane is a greenhousegas 21 times more potent than carbon diox­ide. The process of decay produces ammo­nia too, which in su�cient concentrationscan poison �sh and amphibians and ren­der water undrinkable.

The changing composition of waste go­ing to land�ll also gives rise to other formsof pollution. The bacteria that break downrotting waste produce acids. In the past thehigh proportion of ash in household rub­bish would have helped to neutralisethem, but now they can be concentratedenough to dissolve poisonous heavy met­als such as lead and cadmium. Waterleaching through the land�ll can carrysuch toxins into the groundwater or near­by bodies of water, and from there into

Down in the dumps

Managing waste properly is expensive, which is why rich countries mostly do it better than poor ones

2Rich pickings

Source: OECD

Municipal waste per person Latest year available, kg

0 100 200 300 400 500 600

OECD average

South Africa

Brazil

China

India

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drinking water and the food chain.Western household waste is full of dan­

gerous chemicals. There are paints and bat­teries containing lead; thermometers andlightbulbs containing mercury; electronicgoods full of hazardous substances; pesti­cides from the garden; solvents for clean­ing; and used motor oil from the garage, toname a few of the most common. In the­ory, none of these items should go into or­dinary land�lls. In practice, many do.

Industrial waste, medical waste andmining waste often contain toxic sub­stances in even greater quantities and con­centrations. CyclOpe estimates that theworld’s biggest economies produce per­haps 150m tonnes of hazardous waste ayear between them, but information isalarmingly thin on the ground. Heavy met­als and acids often commingle in miningwaste, much as they do in ordinary land­�lls, and can leach into the soil and water.At the most polluted sites even the dustblown from tailings can be dangerous.

Yet the main alternative, burning waste,can be just as bad, both for people and forthe planet. Smoke from incineration maycarry many of the same toxic substancesup the chimney and into the atmosphere.Nitrogen and sulphur in the smoke con­tribute to acid rain, and soot particlescause respiratory problems. In addition,burning organic waste produces chemicalscalled dioxins and furans, suspected car­cinogens which damage the nervous andimmune systems, among other ill e�ects,and are harmful even in minuscule quanti­ties. After burning there is still the ash to bedisposed of, usually in a land�ll, againwith potentially baleful consequences.

In the 1960s and 1970s a series of grislyaccidents with toxic waste prompted gov­ernments in rich countries to regulate itsdisposal more stringently. In Japan, for ex­ample, the discharge of mercury­ladenchemicals into Minamata Bay killed atleast 1,000 people and made another10,000 ill. In America a neighbourhood inNiagara Falls called Love Canal turned outto have been built on top of clay pits con­taining hazardous waste from a chemicalfactory. Following a huge rise in birth de­fects and miscarriages the governmentmoved over 800 families to new homes.

Most Western governments have sinceimposed rules to minimise pollution fromland�lls and incinerators and to preventleaks of toxic waste. Firms generally need alicence to use, transport or dispose of themost dangerous substances, which arekept track of and often have to be treatedbefore incineration or land�lling. These

rules tend to be strictly enforced. Lastmonth, for example, �rms and municipal­ities that had dumped hazardous waste ina land�ll in New Jersey, causing localgroundwater to be contaminated, agreedto a legal settlement of almost $100m tocover past and future clean­up costs.

Modern land�lls are forced to take elab­orate precautions (see box on the next pagefor an example from a British town calledPitsea). At a recent hearing about the pro­posed expansion of a land�ll on the coastof California, one questioner disputed abureaucrat’s claim that global warmingwould not cause sea levels to rise fastenough to a�ect the site. Another won­dered whether the land�ll was as earth­quake­proof as its owners claimed. A thirdqueried the location of the wells used totest for groundwater contamination. Sev­eral worried that the �ve­yearly reviews ofall these precautions would not be toughenough. The application was eventuallyapproved�but a decade had passed sinceit was �rst lodged.

In his book �The Economics of Waste�,Richard Porter, an academic, examined thecosts and bene�ts of the American govern­ment’s decision to tighten controls onleachate from land�lls in 1991, using datasupplied by the Environmental ProtectionAgency (EPA). The EPA said its new ruleswould save 2.4 people from cancer over300 years, at a cost, Mr Porter calculated, of$3.5 billion each. If the agency’s standarddiscount rate is applied, the cost rises to $32billion for each life saved. True, leachatecan lead to many lesser health problemsand environmental e�ects that the EPA didnot assess. But the sums give a sense ofhow stringent land�ll regulation in richcountries has become.

The same is true of the rules for inciner­ators. Indeed, their advocates now preferto call them waste­to­energy or energy­from­waste plants, which sounds morepositive. One of the world’s biggest suchplants, in Fairfax County, Virginia, takes inabout 1m tonnes of municipal waste ayear, slightly more than the Pitsea land�ll.Two sinister­looking six­taloned mechani­cal claws worthy of a Bond �lm grasp rub­bish �ve tonnes at a time and drop it onto aconveyor. The moving metal grates carrythe waste slowly through a furnace at ever­increasing temperatures to ensure a thor­ough burn. The plant generates up to80MW, enough to power 75,000 homes.

In the control room technicians poreover second­by­second readings of the lev­els of di�erent pollutants in the exhaust. Toeliminate dioxins, regulations require thatthe waste reach a temperature of at least1,800°F. In the smokestack, di�erent �ltersremove oxides of sulphur and nitrogen,acidic gases, heavy metals and soot. All thewater used goes through its own treatmentplant. The ash is moved straight to an adja­cent land�ll, where it takes up only a tenthof the volume of the original waste.

Burnt o�eringsThe EPA has calculated that such controlshave reduced emissions of dioxins and fu­rans from America’s incinerators from8,900 grams a year to 80. By contrast, burn­ing of household and garden waste in bar­rels and bon�res produces 500 grams ayear. Germany’s environment ministryreckons that incinerators have actuallyhelped to improve air quality by reducingthe need for dirtier coal­�red power plants.Yet local authorities in many countries re­main hostile to new incinerators. No newones have been built in America, for exam­ple, since 1995.

It would be reckless to claim that strict­er controls have solved all the West’s wasteproblems. Much still remains to be clearedup from the time before the new ruleswere adopted. And no regulations are fool­proof. Environmental groups such asGreenpeace argue that land�ll gas systemscapture a lower proportion of methaneemissions than waste �rms claim, and thatthe liners that keep leachate in land�lls arebound to spring leaks sooner or later. Theregulators who say that burning rubbish isnow safe were making the same claimwhen incinerators were still spewing outdioxins. And anything that is burned rath­er than recycled represents an energy loss,since more power will be needed to pro­duce replacement materials from scratch.

Hulking hazards

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On the whole, however, land�lls andincinerators seem to attract a dispropor­tionate amount of scrutiny and regula­tion�especially given that some equallydangerous facilities are barely monitoredat all. A worrying loophole in America’srules was revealed in December of lastyear when a collapsed dyke sent a billiongallons of toxic sludge pouring into 300acres of rural Tennessee. The sludge, a mix­ture of water and ash from a coal­�redpower plant, contained signi�cantamounts of poisonous heavy metals. O�­cials say the local drinking water is stillsafe, although the spill has killed �sh innearby rivers. The utility concerned, theTennessee Valley Authority, says it isspending $1m a day on the clean­up.

That coal­ash pond in Tennessee is justone of about 1,300 similar repositoriesacross America. The EPA believes that laxdisposal of coal ash has led to the contami­nation of groundwater in 24 states. But un­der pressure from utilities it had previouslydropped plans to classify coal ash as haz­ardous waste. Last month Lisa Jackson, theagency’s new boss, promised in her con�r­mation hearing to return to the subject.

In poor countries waste is still muchless strictly regulated, and the few rules areseldom enforced. In Madagascar, for exam­ple, only 6% of the rubbish is collected atall. Other countries manage to gather theirwaste, but do not supervise its disposal.The biggest land�ll in Mumbai, India,called Deonar dumping ground, is justthat. Opened in 1927, it occupies the samearea as Pitsea but takes in almost twice asmuch waste a year. Goats and bu�aloesgraze amid the reeking mounds, and thou­sands of scavengers comb the site, lookingfor items of value. When trucks arrive todump their loads, these �rag­pickers� surgeforward to get �rst choice of the refuse. Theensuing mêlées often lead to injuries, saysPrakash Tawase, Deonar’s manager.

Hold your noseMr Tawase has no budget for fencing orcrowd control, let alone modern environ­mental safeguards. No attempt is made tocontrol leachate, which swills out into thesurrounding creeks and marshes and oninto the Arabian Sea. He does not knowhow dangerous it is, because the water isnot tested. Nor is there any system to col­

lect land�ll gas. So during the dry seasonseveral �res break out every day andsmoulder away, releasing plumes of acridsmoke. Mr Tawase’s sta� try to �ght thesewith a water truck and hoses.

Local residents complain that the dumpgives o� horrible smells and that thesmoke from the �res causes asthma andother respiratory ailments. They regularlylodge complaints and march in protest tothe city council’s o�ces. Last year somewent on hunger strike. Local o�cials freelyadmit that the dump is a source of seriouspollution.

Deonar is by no means unusual. Mostof the developing world’s waste, says LuisDiaz, of CalRecovery, a waste consultancy,is put into open dumps with no controls onleachate or land�ll gas. Open burning ofwaste, another common disposal method,releases lots of dioxins, just as it did in in­cinerators in the rich world before therules were tightened.

In 2007 the Blacksmith Institute, anAmerican NGO, listed Dandora in Kenya,the site of Nairobi’s main dump, amongthe world’s 30 most polluted spots. Otherplaces on the institute’s list included La

LANDFILLS in rich countries have tojump through a lot of hoops to make

themselves acceptable these days. For ex­ample, the facility at Pitsea in Britain, onthe banks of the River Thames near Lon­don, accepts only solid municipal andcommercial waste, because European lawprohibits the mingling of liquid and solidwaste, and of hazardous and non­hazard­ous waste. Its permit allows it to take in amillion tonnes of waste a year. The planrequires the parts of the site facing a near­by road and houses to be �lled in and re­habilitated �rst to help hide it from locals’eyes�even though just across the river amassive oil re�nery looms.

The land�ll sits on a natural founda­tion of London clay which is more or lessimpermeable. The owner, Veolia Environ­nement, one of the giants of the industry,has built an underground wall of similar­ly waterproof clay around the site whichextends deep enough to reach the naturalbarrier below. The idea is to seal o� the

land�ll from the surrounding marshesand river, preventing any contaminatedwater��leachate� in the industry jargon�from leaking out. Land�lls without thebene�t of a naturally impermeable layeruse plastic liners and imported clay.

A system of ditches and drains collectsall the leachate, which is pumped througha treatment plant similar to a sewageworks. Before it can be released back intothe nearby watercourses it has to meetstringent standards, including maximumlevels of ammonia, heavy metals and anychemicals that might cause oxygen deple­tion. Veolia is required to sample waterfrom the surrounding area regularly.

The �rm also has to collect the meth­ane emitted by the land�ll, which hasmeant sinking 1,000 wells at regular inter­vals across the 120­hectare site. The gas fu­els ten turbines, each of which generates14MW of electricity. Air quality, dust, lit­ter, odours and vermin are strictly con­trolled too. At other sites Veolia has to use

falcons, cannons, scarecrows, sonar andother gadgets to scare o� the birds that tryto scavenge on the rubbish, but not at Pit­sea, because the surrounding wetlandsare among Britain’s few remaining breed­ing grounds of the black­tailed godwit.

From here to eternityVeolia must also set aside money to en­sure that the leachate continues to betreated, the gas collected, the local envi­ronment monitored and any damage rem­edied after the land�ll stops acceptingwaste, which is meant to happen in 2015.Funding for these �nancial guaranteesmakes up 10­15% of the tipping fee ofaround £25 a tonne (not including the gov­ernment’s land�ll tax). The �rm’s liabilitylasts as long as the land�ll continues togenerate leachate or gas. All the data onpollutants are published. Visitors are al­ways amazed, the site manager says, todiscover how much more there is to land­�lling than tipping waste in a hole.

The charms of modern land�lls A better hole

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Oroya, Peru, where poorly managed e�u­ent from 80 years of mining and smeltinghas left local children with three timesmore lead in their blood than the WorldHealth Organisation’s recommendedmaximum; and Dzerzhinsk, Russia, where300,000 tonnes of chemical waste weredisposed of haphazardly, mostly in Soviettimes. Life expectancy in the city is 42 yearsfor men and 47 for women.

Another big worry is the export of haz­ardous waste from rich countries, where itwould be expensive to get rid of, to poorones, where it can be dumped cheaply. Inprinciple, under a treaty called the BaselConvention, this is illegal unless the receiv­ing government has given explicit priorconsent. But exporters sometimes succeedin passing o� waste chemicals as usefulones, or clapped­out computers as dona­tions for the poor. If ill­paid customs o�­cials spot the deception, they can often bebribed to turn a blind eye.

The United Nations estimates that theworld discards up to 50m tonnes of elec­tronic goods, or e­waste, every year. O�­cial recycling e�orts in rich countries cap­ture just a small fraction of this, accordingto Greenpeace. Most ends up in poor coun­tries where scavengers break apart old mo­bile phones, computers and televisions toextract valuable metals for recycling, re­leasing various harmful substances in theprocess. In an area in Ghana where e­waste is stripped, Greenpeace recentlyfound high levels of lead, dioxins andphthalates, which can damage the liverand testes. Similar degrees of contamina­tion have been found at e­waste dumps inIndia and China.

Many poor countries have built thriv­ing, o�cially sanctioned industries to recy­cle waste that would be considered haz­ardous in the rich world. Almost all theworld’s big ships, for example, are disman­tled and recycled in India, Bangladesh and

Pakistan. Shipbreaking provides jobs fortens of thousands of people, as well ascheap raw materials for industry. But slic­ing up huge oil tankers or freighters onbeaches releases oil, heavy metals, diox­ins, asbestos and other toxic chemicalsinto the sea.

Last voyageThe sea is the ultimate receptacle for muchof the world’s waste. Rubbish is dumpedinto it by ships, or thrown or blown into itfrom coastal settlements, or washed into itthrough rivers, drains and sewage pipes.According to the United Nations Environ­ment Programme (UNEP), perhaps 6.4mtonnes of waste �nds its way into the seaeach year. The Paci�c �gyre� is the worst­a�ected area, but the problem is universal.Research suggests that every square kilo­metre of the ocean has an average of13,000 pieces of plastic �oating in it. Andaccording to other studies, the �oating por­tion makes up just 15% of �marine litter�;another 15% washes up on the shore and70% ends up on the sea bed.

The plastic waste, in particular, doesgreat harm to marine life. Birds, �sh andother animals often die after becoming en­tangled in it or mistakenly eating it. It cansmother reed beds, reefs and other impor­tant ecosystems. It can absorb toxins, mak­ing it more dangerous still to ingest. Eventiny barnacles take in microscopic frag­ments of the stu�, which then move up thefood chain, with unknown consequences.The damage is not just to the environmentbut to �sheries and tourism too. Yet theworld’s governments have made little ef­fort to regulate marine waste at all. 7

Not as clean as it looks

CAN a land�ll ever be too sanitary? Per­haps surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Some of them, it turns out, are so dry andairtight that their contents never rot. Dur­ing its excavations of di�erent land�lls, theGarbage Project at the University of Arizo­na has encountered 15­year­old steak, withfat and meat intact, and 30­year­old news­papers, still quite legible. It concluded thatin many land�lls only food and gardenclippings rot. Other supposedly biode­gradable materials, such as paper andwood, often do not decompose at all.

That may sound like a good thing be­cause it reduces methane emissions andleachate. But it also spreads out the risk ofpollution over a very long period. Andmethane is di�cult to capture in small vol­umes at low concentrations. So WasteManagement, America’s biggest waste�rm, has been experimenting with a typeof land�ll called a �bioreactor�, designedto ensure and accelerate the decay of bio­degradable waste by injecting a mixture ofair, water and recycled leachate. Thatshould increase not just the amount of

methane collected but also the capacity ofthe land�ll, since waste shrinks as it rots. Itshould also reduce the degree of monitor­ing and treatment needed after closure,and allow the site to be put to another usemore quickly.

Waste Management has tried pumpingdi�erent mixtures through land�lls toachieve the desired e�ect, and found thatinjections of out­of­date beer and softdrinks work better than water. It has man­aged to produce gas four times faster thannormal and reduce the volume of the

The appliance of science

Trash goes high­tech

The Economist February 28th 2009 A special report on waste 7

2 waste by up to 35%. The �rm has alreadyapplied the technique to six land�lls andplans to add more this year and next.

Burying is not the only form of wastedisposal where new techniques are beingtested: burning and recycling, which insome countries account for a large propor­tion of the total (see chart 3), are also goingthrough great technological upheaval. Thenext section of this report looks at recy­cling in the traditional sense, of salvagingused metal, plastic and paper. But the sortof recycling where the kit is changing fast­est is arguably the humblest: composting.Converting waste into fertiliser savesspace in land�lls and provides an extrasource of revenue. But traditional com­posting does not save as many green­house­gas emissions as it might, since itstill involves decomposition.

Hence the recent enthusiasm for a tech­nique called anaerobic digestion, whichextracts energy and fertiliser from biode­gradable waste while also reducing emis­sions. Animal slurry, food scraps or gardenclippings are placed in vessels that capturethe methane as they decompose, leavingnothing but liquid and solid fertiliser�which add to the emissions savings by tak­ing the place of chemical fertilisers madefrom fossil fuels.

However, even small amounts of strayplastic or glass can cause the whole pro­cess to break down. Municipalities that askresidents to separate their biodegradablewaste from other rubbish often end upwith material that is too contaminated tobe of much use. It is only in places with lotsof farms generating big quantities of ani­mal slurry, such as Denmark and southernAmerica, that the practice is taking o�.

Another nascent treatment for biode­gradable waste is enzymatic hydrolysis,which uses enzymes to break down com­plex molecules into sugars from which eth­anol can be fermented. At present this pro­cess is uneconomic, but Steen Riisgaard,the boss of Novozymes, one of the �rmsthat make the enzymes, says the cost is fall­ing fast and claims that his American cus­tomers will be making money by 2011,with the help of government subsidies.

If Mr Riisgaard is right, there is a wealthof farm waste that could be turned intofuel, from corn cobs to citrus peel to woodchips. By 2030, America aims to produce5% of its power, 20% of its transport fueland 25% of its chemicals from biomass�mostly farm, forestry and municipalwaste. By the same date the European Un­ion estimates that waste could provideabout 6% of all its energy.

It is burning, however, that has attract­ed the most futuristic technologies. Inmany countries waste­to­energy technol­ogy in its traditional form is being heldback by fears about pollution, which makeit hard to get licences and permits. More­over, waste can vary enormously fromplace to place and day to day, making ithard to calibrate equipment. That can leadto higher maintenance costs and lower en­ergy yields than expected.

One solution is to treat waste beforeburning it to obtain a more consistent fuel.The simplest technique is to chop it up.That helps a little, but does nothing to sep­arate out the items that do not burn or thatwould fetch a higher price if recycled.

Sterile solutionInstead, several �rms are touting an alter­native treatment called autoclaving. In es­sence, autoclaves are industrial­sized rotat­ing pressure­cookers. They have been usedto sterilise things since the 19th century, butsteaming municipal waste in them is anew idea. The combination of heat, mo­tion and pressure cleans recyclable items,even washing o� labels and glue. It alsobreaks down food, paper and other com­bustible material into a �brous mass thatcan be used either as fuel or for anaerobicdigestion. The fuel is of su�cient qualityand consistency to allow it to be used as asubstitute for coal in factories and powerplants, not just in incinerators.

A British �rm called Sterecycle openedthe world’s �rst big waste autoclave innorth­east England last year and recentlyannounced plans to double its capacity. Arival, Graphite Resources, is building aneven bigger plant nearby and there areplans for several more around Britain. Butindustry veterans question whether therevenue from the recyclables and the fuelwill justify the capital and running costs.

Much the same doubt surrounds two

other technologies called gasi�cation andpyrolysis. Again, both have been aroundsince the 19th century, but used for otherthings. They both involve heating, ratherthan burning, waste until it breaks downinto a �ammable mixture of carbon mon­oxide and hydrogen, called syngas, and re­sidual char, ash or slag. The syngas can beconverted into a number of di�erentchemicals or even liquid fuel. Waste Man­agement, for example, has started a pilotscheme to turn it into diesel.

A few dozen gasi�cation and pyrolysisplants are up and running in Europe andJapan, and more are planned. Proponentsargue that they are cleaner than existingwaste­to­energy facilities. But the main ad­vantage of these technologies over inciner­ation, at least in theory, is that syngas canpower gas turbines to make electricity.These are more e�cient than the steam tur­bines used in waste­to­energy plants. Thehitch is that syngas from waste is full oftarry residue that tends to gum up the tur­bine. It usually needs to be �ltered, a stepthat raises the cost and reduces the overalle�ciency of the process.

Several �rms have come up with waysto make cleaner syngas. One method in­volves a device called a plasma arc gasi�er,which generates arti�cial lightning boltsbetween two electrodes. The temperatureof the arc itself can reach 13,000°C or more.Even a few feet away it can be over4,000°C, more than enough to vaporisemost waste and break down complex mol­ecules. When the gas is cooled, any hazard­ous elements in the waste end up sealed ina glassy slag that is safe to put into land�ll.

What some pilot plants have shown sofar, however, is that a lot of the electricityproduced is needed to power the arc. Plansfor the �rst full­scale facility, in Saint Lucie,Florida, were recently scaled back.

Ze­Gen, based in Massachusetts, gas­i�es waste by injecting it into molten steel.The syngas rises through the pool, heavymetals sink to the bottom and other con­taminants form a slag on top. Running thiskind of furnace, says Bill Davis, the com­pany’s boss, consumes only 15% of the en­ergy it produces.

The chief problem Ze­Gen and other�rms with whizz­bang waste technologiesface, says Mr Davis, is raising money tobuild full­scale plants. At the moment nei­ther banks nor individual investors havethe appetite to take a punt on an unprovenidea. In the longer term he worries that somany new waste­processing facilities willspring up that they may actually have tocompete for rubbish. 7

3Bury, burn or recycle?

Source: Institute for Public Policy Research

Municipal waste management, % of total

0 20 40 60 80 100

Greece

Britain

Germany

Denmark

Netherlands

Landfill Recycled/composted/other

Incineration

8 A special report on waste The Economist February 28th 2009

1

GREG RUIZ and Tara Bai Hiyale live onopposite sides of the world, in utterly

di�erent cities: San Francisco and Mum­bai. Mr Ruiz has a steady job which bringsin almost $20 an hour, along with a pen­sion, health insurance and even a stake inthe company concerned, thanks to an em­ployee share­ownership plan. Mrs Hiyalelives hand to mouth, subsisting in a slumon 100 rupees a day with the help of a localcharity. Yet they both do the same job: sort­ing through the local rubbish, trying to sal­vage goods that can be re­used. The starkdi�erences in their circumstances say a lotabout the global business of recycling.

In India, recycling provides a livelihoodfor millions. Most urban households donot throw out unwanted paper, plastic andmetal. Instead, they save it and sell it to itin­erant traders called kabari­wallahs whocome to call at regular intervals. The re­maining waste is picked over by the clean­ers and watchmen at the apartment blockthey live in before being put out in a mu­nicipal skip where rag­pickers like Mrs Hi­yale search through it again. When trucksdeliver the rubbish from these skips todumps such as Deonar, more rag­pickerscomb over it yet again.

Mumbai is thought to be home to hun­dreds of thousands of rag­pickers. Nowonder that until recently Mrs Hiyalecould not count on a steady income. Whatshe earned depended on how much shefound scouring the streets and rummagingthrough the skips of the suburb of Ghatko­par, where she lives, and the price her dis­coveries fetched. Most of the time she tookin less than 100 rupees a day. She had be­come a rag­picker decades ago when adrought struck Mumbai’s rural hinterland,forcing her and her husband to abandonthe land they farmed and seek work in thecity. �Every day was a bad day,� she says.

A few years ago Mrs Hiyale came acrossStree Mukti Sanghatana, a feminist charitythat seeks to provide female rag­pickers(the vast majority) with more stability andsecurity. Now she retrieves the rubbish ofapartment blocks that have an arrange­ment with the charity and sorts the recy­clable portion in one of its sheds. She stillearns only 100 rupees a day, but at least,she says, she has access to a steady stream

of waste. She also has somewhere to storethe material she collects, safe from thievesand gouging policemen. And she no longerhas to work outdoors all day in the blazingsun and torrential monsoon rain.

The swarming �ies and sickly, fetidsmell that �ll the shed do not seem to puther o� her work. She sits on a low, pinkplastic stool, behind a mound of unsortedgoods which she is gradually dividing intosmaller piles. Copper wiring goes in oneheap, aluminium foil in another. Iron andsteel is divided by thickness; the heftierpieces fetch a higher price. The same goesfor plastic bags. Cloth, leather, Tetra Paks�each has its own pile. Coconut shells gointo a bag hanging from the rafters.

Another woman comes in, carrying aload of plastic bottles several times herown size on her head. She will sort it bytype of plastic and by colour. In anotherpart of the shed a third woman stands

knee­deep in waste paper which she is sep­arating into cardboard, newspaper, o�cepaper, glossy paper, coloured paper andenvelopes�which, she says proudly, fetchfour rupees a kilo, against just one rupeefor the newspaper.

Rag­picking de luxeIn San Francisco, Mr Ruiz works for NorcalWaste Systems, which handles most of thecity’s household rubbish. Some days hestands by a conveyor belt in a huge ware­house, picking wood, cardboard, plaster­board and metal out of demolition debris.The belt moves quite fast, so only the big­gest pieces can be retrieved. The rest fallsinto a skip, to be hauled o� to a land�ll.

At other times he drives a bulldozer in�the pit�, where rubbish trucks dump SanFrancisco’s household waste, to be loadedonto bigger trucks also headed for theland�ll. In theory, residents have alreadyseparated out anything that is recyclable orbiodegradable. In practice, many do notbother. Lots of plastic bottles and papercan be seen through the muddle andgrime. A study commissioned by Norcalfound that 70% of the material going intothe pit could have been recycled.

In another cathedral­like warehouse bymunicipal Pier 96, Norcal sorts the stu� lo­cal residents put into their recycling bins.An impossibly complicated network ofconveyor belts, chutes and tubes whizzesthe trash this way and that. Machines sep­arate out di�erent materials, in much thesame way as Mrs Hiyale and her fellowrag­pickers do back in Mumbai. A magnetlifts up any iron and steel. A gadget calledan �eddy­current separator� causes othermetals, such as aluminium and copper, tojump, literally, o� the line into di�erentbins. A series of whirling discs arrangedinto a steep slope carries the lighter goods�mainly paper�upwards but allows heavi­er ones to fall. Workers pick o� phonebooks, glass and plastic bottles.

Yet despite all this clever kit, the sortingat Pier 96 is much less elaborate and pre­cise than that performed by Mumbai’s rag­pickers. Plastic and paper is separated intofewer colours and categories; indeed,many types of plastic are not accepted atall. The conveyor belts move too fast to

Round and round it goes

Recycling is good for the environment, but it costs. Is it worth it?

It’s a job

The Economist February 28th 2009 A special report on waste 9

2

1

catch everything and the workers and ma­chines both make mistakes that they can­not correct.

Norcal is constantly striving to recyclemore, and to improve the purity of the pro­cessed waste it produces. As it is, the city ofSan Francisco keeps some 70% of its wasteout of land�lls�one of the highest rates inthe world. That �gure is all the more re­markable because almost none of the non­land�ll waste is burned. The city councilhas set a goal of 75% recycling by next yearand hopes eventually to achieve �zerowaste�. It has written Norcal’s contract insuch a way that the more the �rm recycles,the more money it earns.

So Norcal invests in expensive facilitiessuch as the one at Pier 96. It runs vigorouscampaigns encouraging its customers torecycle. Its garbage trucks are covered withbig pictures contrasting mouldering card­board with healthy forests and festering ta­ble scraps with prospering farms. It in­spects its trucks to see which buildings orneighbourhoods are throwing away lots ofrecyclables and gets its sta� to contact theworst o�enders to urge them to be morecareful. It even has an artist­in­residenceprogramme, designed to show how usefuland beautiful junk can be. A recent incum­bent made a dress out of used plastic bags;another tried to express �our society’s abu­sive pattern of production and waste� byweaving bits of trash together.

No one knows Mumbai’s recycling rate,but it seems likely to exceed San Francis­co’s, for a simple reason. In Mumbai recy­cling is a pro�table pursuit for all involved,whereas in San Francisco it costs most resi­dents money. Indian rag­pickers require nowages, equipment or electricity. By con­trast, Norcal has invested $38m in the ma­terials recovery facility (or MRF, in the in­dustry jargon) at Pier 96 and keeps payingout on running costs.

The revenue from Norcal’s MRFs coversroughly half their outgoings. Metal is theonly material that is consistently pro�tableto salvage, says Mike Sangiacomo, Norcal’sboss. Cardboard usually is; most of theother goods the �rm sends for recycling, in­cluding glass, plastic and other types of pa­per, usually are not.

The shortfall is covered by Norcal’s cus­tomers, who pay about $25 a month forwaste disposal. Whether that price isworth paying is a complicated question.The answer depends, among other things,on the cost of alternative disposal meth­ods and the value ascribed to the environ­mental bene�ts. At the most basic level, re­cycling competes with land�lling. That is

reasonably cheap around San Francisco.However, Jared Blumenfeld, head of

the city’s Department of the Environment,explains that even in California, with itsstrict regulation, land�lling involves envi­ronmental costs that the city wants toavoid on principle. Climate change is thebiggest concern. California has adoptedambitious targets for reducing emissions,and methane from land�lls makes up 18%of the city’s emissions.

There has been little detailed cost­bene­�t analysis of California’s emissions tar­gets, Mr Blumenfeld happily concedes, orof San Francisco’s aim of zero waste, or ofany of the myriad environmental targetsset by the city and by the state. Politiciansadopt them because they think voters willlike the sound of them. And they do: the re­cycling programme, Mr Blumenfeld says, iseven more popular than the mayor, GavinNewsom, who won 72% of the vote at themost recent election.

But there must be a price that even SanFranciscans would balk at paying to re­duce their waste. Mr Sangiacomo thinks hecould increase the recycling rate by gettingthe trash in the pit sorted manually, but isnot sure the city council would approvethe extra expense. In less high­mindedplaces, voters and politicians may wellsnap their purses shut much sooner.

That is what governments all aroundthe rich world are now grappling with. Theeconomic downturn has cut prices for re­cyclables by half or more since last sum­mer. The shares of big recycling �rms, suchas China’s Nine Dragons Paper, haveplunged over the past year. The Americanand Canadian arm of Smur�t­Stone,which makes recycled cardboard, has �ledfor bankruptcy. Some traders have been re­duced to stockpiling their wares in thehope that prices will rise. Others are asking

governments for support. There is little doubt that recycling is

good for the environment. In 2006 theTechnical University of Denmark conduct­ed a review of 272 studies comparing thee�ects of recycling with those of land�ll­ing or incineration. They came up with 188scenarios involving di�erent materialsand recycling methods. In 83% of these sce­narios recycling proved the greener of theavailable options.

For materials such as aluminium, thecase is overwhelming. Recycling it requiresonly a tiny fraction of the energy con­sumed when mining bauxite and re�ningit into the same amount of metal. For otherproducts the bene�ts are more �nely bal­anced. Glass is heavy, so transporting ituses up a lot of fossil fuel. Collecting it andgrinding it up into aggregate to make roadscan consume more energy than taking it toland�ll. But recycling it to make more bot­tles generally reaps an energy saving.

The green green glass of homeTo recycle glass back into bottles, however,it needs to be sorted by colour. In general,the narrower the categories into which re­cyclables are sorted and the more meticu­lous the separation, the easier they are toprocess and the higher the price they fetch.White o�ce paper is worth more thanmixed paper, for example, and bottlesmade from a single kind of plastic areworth more than an assortment.

That is where the economics start get­ting tricky. Manual sorting is expensive inthe rich world, which is why recyclablesare often shipped to places with low la­bour costs. It helps that there are lots of al­most empty container ships sailing back toAsia after unloading consumer goods inEurope and America: they will usually car­ry secondhand paper and plastic for a

From bottle to bottle

10 A special report on waste The Economist February 28th 2009

2 song. After preliminary sorting at Pier 96,for example, many of San Francisco’s sal­vaged materials are loaded straight intocontainers bound for China, where theywill be combed over much more thor­oughly before being recycled.

The biggest American exporter by vol­ume is a �rm called American ChungNam. In 2007 it sent o� 211,300 containersof waste paper for recycling, almost all ofthem to its sister company in China, NineDragons Paper. There were six other recy­cling �rms among the 20 biggest exporters.In 2006 CyclOpe estimated the value ofthe international trade in recyclables atwell over $100 billion.

Sort it yourselfAnother way to make recycling cheaper isto get the household or business that gen­erates the waste to sort it free of charge.This is done without demur in much of Eu­rope and Asia, where municipalities oftencollect paper, plastics, metal and glass sep­arately. (Consumers can be further encour­aged to return cans or bottles by includinga deposit in their price.) But the Anglo­Sax­on world dislikes sorting its own wasteand often makes a hash of it. In San Fran­cisco Mr Newsom wants to oblige resi­dents to keep organic waste out of theirrubbish bins. Originally he proposed �nesof up to $1,000 for persistent o�enders, butthis caused such outrage that the �gurewas reduced to $100. Even so, says Mr Blu­menfeld, the policy is unlikely to be vigor­ously enforced.

Most cities in America are allowingtheir citizens to throw anything recyclableinto a single bin, to be sorted out at an MRF

like the one at Pier 96 in San Francisco.Thanks in part to the spread of such pro­

grammes, America’s recycling rate dou­bled between 1995 and 2005, to 32%. Overthe same period Europe’s, which started at22%, rose to 41%.

MRFs are getting more sophisticated allthe time. At a plant on the outskirts of Lon­don a �rm called Closed Loop Recyclingsorts plastic bottles before recycling them.One machine uses optical scanning towork out what sort of plastic the bottlesare made of. Blasts of air from a line of noz­zles then direct each one to the appropriatebin. This device can cope with only a fewdi�erent categories and often makes mis­takes. But another machine in the plant,which uses a laser to scan the passing ma­terial, can sort plastic by type and colourwith great accuracy.

This process, says Chris Dow, ClosedLoop’s managing director, was �a lab trial�two years ago. The �rm is now taking partin a new trial to see whether similar de­vices can separate mixed plastics of allkinds rather than just bottles. That woulddramatically improve the economics of re­cycling items of marginal value, such as yo­gurt pots. Thanks to such advances, saysMr Dow, the number of things that can bepro�tably recycled will keep expanding.

But Closed Loop can a�ord such fancykit only because there is a strong market forits product: plastic of su�cient quality tobe used to package food. British retailersare keen to increase the amount of recy­cled material in their packaging, partly be­cause it is slightly cheaper than the virginsort but mainly because their customersare keen on the idea. Tesco, Britain’s biggestretailer, advertises a line of school uni­forms made from recycled polyester. Oneof the ways it has responded to the grow­ing clamour against plastic bags, says Alas­

dair James, its director of recycling, wasteand packaging, is to use recycled ones.

Most of the bottles Closed Loop is cur­rently recycling would otherwise havebeen shipped to China to be transformedinto lower­grade plastic for cheap hardhats, arti�cial �eeces and the like. But such�downcycling� tends to be much less prof­itable than genuine recycling, and muchmore vulnerable to price swings. ClosedLoop is still making money. It plans to builda second plant this year, despite the eco­nomic gloom.

Closed Loop’s success did not comeabout by chance. The Waste and ResourcesAction Programme (WRAP), a govern­ment­funded agency charged with reduc­ing land�lling, among other worthy goals,helped to pay for the initial trial of the recy­cled bottles. It also helped to bring togetherClosed Loop, Veolia (which supplies theused bottles), the retailers that buy the re­cycled plastic and the banks that �nancedthe plant. It is now providing similar helpwith the attempt to sort mixed plastics.

WRAP’s aim is to harness market forcesrather than �ght them. By getting munici­palities and waste �rms together it can en­sure big and steady enough streams of dif­ferent materials to justify investment innew recycling plants. By pooling potentialbuyers of recycled goods it helps to pro­vide those plants with su�cient custom­ers. And its involvement helps to reassurethe investors.

But the most e�ective policy would beto incorporate the costs of the pollutioncaused by gathering and processing virginmaterials into their prices. That wouldalign environmental goals with businessones, sparing governments the trouble oftrying to balance the recyclers’ books. 7

RECYCLING aside, waste �rms often de­scribe themselves as recession­proof.

The logic is simple: their workload is al­ways increasing. As countries get richerand more urban and their populations ex­pand, they throw away ever more stu�.The OECD forecasts that although munici­pal waste in rich countries will grow onlyby a fairly sedate average of 1.3% a year upto 2030, or about 38% in all, India’s city­dwellers will be generating 130% more rub­

bish and China’s over 200% more over thesame period. That increase will comepartly from a growing amount of wastegenerated per person but mainly from arising urban population. Overall, NickolasThemelis of Columbia University expectsworldwide waste to double by 2030.

Growing wealth generally goes hand inhand with more concern for the local envi­ronment. In time, governments in develop­ing countries will make sure that more

waste is collected and tighten the rulesabout disposal. For example, India’s Su­preme Court has ruled that all cities of100,000 people or more should provide awaste­collection service. The Indian gov­ernment, for its part, has set guidelines andtargets for treatment and is working on alaw on e­waste. At present these rules areobserved mainly in the breach, but withtime and public pressure complianceshould grow.

Muck and brass

The waste business smells of money

1

The Economist February 28th 2009 A special report on waste 11

1

In rich and poor countries alike the au­thorities are increasingly inclined to en­trust waste management to the private sec­tor. That re�ects not just the economicorthodoxy of recent decades but also therising cost of complying with ever stricterenvironmental rules. In Britain municipal­ities have been obliged to hold public ten­ders for waste management since 1989. InAmerica private �rms dispose of roughly70% of all waste. The more go­ahead citiesin China, including Beijing, Shanghai andGuangzhou, have handed some rubbish­disposal contracts to private �rms.

Mumbai o�ers a good example of theway things are going. Its collection rate isalready well above the Indian average of60%. Its environmental standards are alsorising. Although almost all its waste cur­rently goes to municipally owned dumpssuch as Deonar, with almost no pollutioncontrols, the city plans to transform theminto sanitary land�lls and to build a new,greener facility from scratch. It is also in­stalling equipment to collect methane andleachate at a recently closed dump, Gorai.The role of the private sector is growing:the local government has brought in con­sultants for the Gorai project and hopes toinvolve private partners in the land�llschemes. It is already using contractors totake most waste to its dumps.

One big Indian city, Chennai, has con­tracted out its rubbish collection to VeoliaEnvironnement, one of the giants of thewaste industry, which has a number ofcontracts in developing countries, includ­ing Brazil, South Africa and China. Its mainrival, Suez Environnement, is active in Chi­na, Morocco and elsewhere. Covanta, theworld’s biggest waste­to­energy �rm, al­ready runs one facility in China and hasseveral more in the works.

Waste �rms see ample opportunities in

the rich world, too, because ever stricterregulations are helping to make up for theslower growth in waste volumes. On thewhole, says Henri Proglio, the boss of Veo­lia Environnement, the more complicatedthe treatment, the higher the margin.

Between 1985 and 2005, as America’sregulations got tighter and small land�llswent out of business, average tipping feesrose from less than $10 per tonne to almost$35. But the European Union is probablythe most zealous regulator: it has separatelegally binding �directives� on waste poli­cy in general, hazardous waste, the tran­sportation of waste, pollution control,land�lls, incinerators, and a host of specif­ic sorts of waste, from cars to packaging toelectronic goods. That has helped to pushaverage tipping fees much higher thanAmerica’s: ¤74 a tonne in France, for exam­ple, and ¤50 in Italy, according to CyclOpe.

The big waste­industry companies wel­come tighter regulation. Unlike the tid­dlers, they can a�ord the investment need­ed to comply with it. The search foreconomies of scale has led to dramaticconsolidation in recent decades. In Britain,between 1992 and 2001the market share ofthe 15 biggest companies rose from 30% to60%. In America consolidation is still inprogress. Last year the third­biggest waste�rm, Republic Services, spurned an o�erfrom the biggest, Waste Management, and

instead spent $6 billion buying the second­biggest, Allied Waste Industries. The tworemaining �rms have a combined marketshare of 41%, according to Standard &Poor’s, a rating agency.

It just keeps comingFor such big, integrated �rms, waste is alsoa very stable business. Although house­holds and businesses produce somewhatless rubbish in tough economic times, thedecline in volume is usually only a per­centage point or two, says Mr Parker of theNational Solid Wastes Management Asso­ciation. And contracts often run for longperiods. Four Winds Capital Management,an investment �rm that is setting up awaste­industry fund, reckons that the aver­age length of a collection contract is sevenyears; of a disposal contract, nine years;and of an integrated contract, 17 years. Nowonder that the big �rms’ earnings are stillgrowing nicely. Shares of listed waste �rmshave also su�ered less than most in the re­cent downturn (see chart 4).

Waste �rms often have multiple rev­enue streams, which can also help themweather a downturn. A waste­to­energy�rm, for example, earns �gate fees� for tak­ing the waste in the �rst place, as well aspayments for the power it generates andany metals it recovers from the ash. Recy­cling �rms are the obvious exception, buteven they deal in a variety of goods whoseprices do not always move in lockstep.

Concern about global warming shouldprovide a big boost for the waste businessin the future. Methane from land�lls ac­counts for only about 4% of greenhousegases, but it can be dealt with relativelycheaply and easily. Recycling tends to con­sume less energy than making goods fromscratch, which helps to curb emissions.

Cities are particularly keen to tackleland�ll gas, says Mr Blumenfeld of SanFrancisco’s Department of Environment,because it is one of the few sources ofemissions over which they have jurisdic­tion. And in places that do not have muchheavy industry it can make quite a largecontribution to total emissions: in SanFrancisco its share is 18%.

In many countries power from land�llgas or waste­to­energy plants (like the oneat Spittelau, outside Vienna, illustratedhere) attracts subsidies of one kind or an­other because it saves emissions. In the de­veloping world it can earn UN­backed car­bon credits, which can be sold togovernments or �rms that must reducetheir emissions under the Kyoto protocol.Mumbai, for one, plans to sell such credits Artful Spittelau

4Junk holds its own

Sources: Thomson Datastream; Société Générale

Total-return indexJanuary 1st 2007=100, ¤ terms

2007 08 0950

60

70

80

90

100

110

120

MSCI World

SGI Global Waste Management

2

12 A special report on waste The Economist February 28th 2009

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when its land�ll­gas project at Goraicomes on stream.

Firms such as Covanta see worriesabout climate change as a spur to waste­to­energy projects. Incineration could saveup to a gigatonne of emissions if widelyadopted, says Covanta’s boss, AnthonyOrlando. That is about one­seventh of thecurrent global total. Already, the world’s700­odd waste­to­energy plants generatemore power than all its wind turbines andsolar panels put together.

Japan and Singapore burn more than50% of their municipal waste. Burning isalso popular in many European countries.

China currently incinerates only 2% of itsrubbish, but has set itself a goal of 30% by2030. That will involve an investment of atleast $6.3 billion, according to New EnergyFinance, a research out�t. Even America isthinking again: in 20­odd states that re­quire utilities to generate a proportion oftheir power from renewable sources,waste­to­energy plants count towards thegoal. Mr Themelis reckons it could supplyas much as 4% of the country’s electricity.

But it is Britain that currently o�ers thebiggest incentives to waste �rms. Trying tomeet a target set by one of those Europeandirectives, it discourages land�lling by tax­

ing it heavily. The tax rose by £8 per tonnein April last year, to £32 ($46, ¤37), and is setto rise by a further £8 both this year andnext. In a country that still sends over halfits waste to land�ll, municipalities andbusinesses are desperate to �nd otherways of disposing of their rubbish.

No wonder, then, that so many of themare experimenting with avant­garde tech­nologies. The government estimates thatmeeting the target will require £10 billionof investment. As one entrepreneur puts it,Britain is �beachfront property� for any­one with a nifty new waste­processingtechnology to sell. 7

SIEBEN LINDEN, a hamlet in former EastGermany, half­way between Hamburg

and Berlin, looks deceptively normal.There is a cluster of houses, some �elds, afew cars parked by the side of the road anda small shop, all set against the backdrop ofa looming pine forest.

Closer inspection, however, reveals afew peculiarities. Several of the modern­looking buildings turn out to be made ofwood, straw and mud. There are hugequantities of logs, because wood­�redstoves and boilers provide all the heating,and quite a few solar panels, which gener­ate most of the electricity. And there aremore young people around than usual inrural Germany. Sieben Linden, a self­pro­claimed eco­village, is growing fast, unlikethe surrounding towns.

The 120 inhabitants have decided to livein as green a manner as possible. They aretrying to wean themselves o� fossil fuels,grow their own food and timber, acquirefewer frivolous possessions and produceless waste. Food comes either from theirown �elds or from wholesalers, so there isno need for much packaging. Any scrapsare composted. Urine from the toilets is di­verted to a reedbed for natural puri�ca­tion, and the faeces are turned into com­post for the community’s forest.

The residents live separately but sharebig appliances such as washing machinesand cars. Before buying a new tool, say,they will put a note into the community’slogbook to ask if anybody has one theycould borrow. If not, they will probablybuy one secondhand. They often wear one

another’s hand­me­downs. Unwantedpossessions are left out for others to helpthemselves.

Carefree consumption is not actuallyforbidden, though it would raise eye­brows, says Eva Stützel, who helped tofound Sieben Linden over a decade ago.But the main reason the inhabitants buyless and waste less is that they have a richcommunity life which does not revolvearound trips to shops, restaurants and cin­emas. They go ice­skating on a nearbypond in winter and swimming in summer;they teach one another horseriding andyoga and tai chi; they put on plays and con­certs and seminars.

The idea, explains Kosha Joubert, an­other resident, is not to adopt a dreary, as­cetic lifestyle but to demonstrate that it ispossible to live in a green manner withoutundue sacri�ce or disruption. Western ur­banites could easily adopt elements of theeco­village lifestyle, she says, by formingcar pools, say, or shopping co­operatives.

Tipping pointUntil recently most people in the waste in­dustry had assumed that it was impossibleto reduce the amount being produced andwere concentrating on putting the stu� tobetter use. But lately that assumption hasbeen challenged. For one thing, the pace atwhich the rich world churns out rubbishhas been slowing.

Between 1980 and 2000 the amount ofwaste produced by the OECD countries in­creased by an average of 2.5% a year. Be­tween 2000 to 2005 the average growth

rate slowed to 0.9%. That was just ahead ofthe rate of population growth (0.7%), butwell behind the rate of economic growth(2.2%). The OECDdescribes this as �a ratherstrong relative decoupling of municipalwaste generation from economic growth�,although it expresses some misgivingsabout the reliability of the data. The Euro­pean Union has detected a similar trend inseveral European countries, as has Cy­clOpe, the research institute.

Reducing the amount of waste beingproduced makes a great deal of sense, pro­vided it does not cost more, in either envi­ronmental or �nancial terms, than dispos­ing of it in the usual way. Governmentshope it might help to trim both green­house­gas emissions and waste­manage­ment costs. But they are not sure how bestto encourage it.

Some are trying to persuade consumersto throw away less. The simplest method isto collect the rubbish less often. In areas ofBritain where the dustmen come roundonly every other week, recycling rates are10% higher than elsewhere.

Another tactic is to make householdspay by volume for the rubbish they gener­ate, rather than through a �at fee orthrough local taxes. Many places in Eu­rope, America and Asia have adopted�pay­as­you­throw� schemes. (In Taiwan,householders even have to chuck theirown rubbish into the truck.) About a quar­ter of Americans live in communities withsuch programmes. The EPA reckons thatthey reduce the volume of rubbish by14­27% and increase recycling (which usu­

Less is more

The ultimate in waste disposal is to tackle the problem at source

The Economist February 28th 2009 A special report on waste 13

2

1

ally remains free) by 32­59%. There are drawbacks. Fly­tipping�the

illegal dumping of waste�tends to riseslightly as people try to avoid paying. Andhouseholders generally grumble a lot ifthey have to pay extra to have their rub­bish collected. Some communities have re­sponded by o�ering rebates to those whothrow away less�a more palatable way ofpackaging the same idea. But most localauthorities have simply decided againstthe idea. When the British government of­fered them money to experiment withpay­as­you­throw schemes earlier thisyear, not one signed up.

Businesses are generally seen as a softertarget than consumers. It can be arguedthat manufacturers bear some responsibil­ity for the amount of waste rich countriesproduce. They often have an incentive toreduce waste anyway, since most alreadypay for disposal by volume. There is even aname for the steady reduction in materialsused to make the same goods: �light­weighting�. It is not only electronic gadgetsthat have become smaller and lighter overthe years even as their performance hasimproved but many other things too, fromcars to plastic bags.

The average aluminium drink can isnow only half as thick as it was in the1960s, according to Molson Coors, the �rmthat introduced this type of container in1959. Its American subsidiary has reducedthe weight of its cans by 7% in the past �ve

years alone. That means savings not onlyon the metal itself but also on transportand even cooling: thinner cans chill faster.

O�cials in the EU, in particular, arekeen to hurry lightweighting along.WRAP, the British agency charged with re­ducing waste, is trying to promote it for va­rious sorts of packaging. It funded trials ofa lightweight pull­tab lid for food tins,which it believes could save 15,000 tonnesof steel each year in Britain alone. Heinz, agiant food manufacturer which took partin the trial, hopes that adopting the newlids will save it £400,000 a year. WRAP hasconducted similar tests of thinner glassand plastic bottles, with equally promisingresults.

WRAP also cajoled Britain’s biggest su­permarkets and food suppliers into signinga voluntary agreement to halt the growthin packaging by last year and start reducingit from 2010. Last July it announced that theinitial target had been met, despite a 1.8%rise in sales. Some �rms are going muchfurther: in 2007 Tesco pledged to reduce itspackaging by a quarter by 2010.

In theory, consumers could steer �rmstowards waste reduction by buying pro­ducts that are easy to recycle, say, or haveonly minimal packaging. To some extentthis is happening. Tesco’s Alasdair Jamessays British consumers rank the environ­ment as their third priority after price andconvenience. But many governments aretrying to give greenery an extra push with

compulsory waste­reduction schemes.Some levy fees on certain products, akin tobottle deposits, to ensure they are dis­posed of safely. Thirty­six states in Ameri­ca, for example, charge for the disposal oftyres. The states spend the money onclean­up programmes or pay others to runsuch programmes. Many of the tyres areblended into road surfaces or burned in ce­ment kilns. Several other states have �ad­vance recovery fees� for computer moni­tors and televisions. So have Japan, SouthKorea and Taiwan, among others, and Chi­na is working on a scheme.

The problem with fee programmes isthat all goods in a category are subject tothe same charge, whether they are easy orhard to get rid of. That gives manufacturersno incentive to build easy disposal into thedesign of a product.

One answer is to ban certain sub­stances outright, thereby eliminating theneed to dispose of them later. A number ofplaces, from San Francisco to the tiny Hi­malayan kingdom of Bhutan, have bannedor severely restricted the use of plasticbags. The EU barred the use of severalheavy metals and �ame retardants in elec­tronic goods in 2006 and recently pro­posed expanding the scheme. SeveralAmerican states were so impressed thatthey have copied the EU’s rules.

Return to senderBut the EU has gone further, applying aconcept called �extended producer re­sponsibility� to an ever­expanding list ofitems including cars and computers. At itssimplest, this means that manufacturershave to take back their products withoutcharge when consumers have �nishedwith them. The EU’s directive on �end­of­life vehicles� not only obliges manufactur­ers to accept vehicles that are no longerwanted, but also requires them to recycleor re­use 80% of the parts by weight, a pro­portion that will rise to 85% by 2015. Themanufacturers can farm out the job, butonly to authorised �rms.

Hewlett­Packard (HP), which makeslots of electronic devices that are subject tosuch rules, says it welcomes them. It has al­ways tried to design its products not justfrom cradle to grave, a spokesman ex­plains, but from cradle to cradle�meaningwith recycling in mind. Its laptops are 90%recyclable and its printers at least 70%. Bylast year HP had recycled over 450,000tonnes of used equipment. It aims to dou­ble that �gure by the end of next year. At itsfacility in Roseville, California, workers�rst check discarded computers and print­A lifestyle choice at Sieben Linden

14 A special report on waste The Economist February 28th 2009

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ers to see if they can be re­used: it refur­bishes 2.5m devices a year. The rest are tak­en to bits. First the big, accessible parts areremoved, along with anything dangerous,and then heavy­duty shredders grind upthe remainder into tiny pieces that can besorted by standard recycling equipment.

An engineer explains how a decade ofsuch work has taught HP how to make theprocess simpler and cheaper. It now usesscrews instead of glues wherever possible,and has reduced the number of di�erentkinds of plastic in its products from 200 to�ve. It plans to eliminate one more�poly­vinyl chloride�from new computer mod­els this year. It is proud of having closedthe loop on ink cartridges for its printers,which it now makes from old cartridges.

But the �rm would like to go further, de­signing computers so that they can be easi­ly upgraded rather than replaced. Ulti­mately, says Chandrakant Patel, whoheads its �sustainable IT ecosystems lab­oratory�, modern computer systems willallow �rms to calculate the precise dispo­sal costs of a product during the designphase and include them in the sale price.More sophisticated products will alsowarn users when they are about to fail,eliminating the need for spare capacity.

Think before you legislateSadly, however, that sort of world is still along way o�. Governments are wildly in­consistent in their approach to extendedproducer responsibility. They tend tohome in on particular products withoutjusti�cation (tyres, after all, are not amongthe biggest threats to the planet). Theirgoals seem arbitrary too: how did the EU

decide that 85% of car parts had to be recy­cled, not 84% or 86%? And why should thedeadline be 2015, not some other year?

O�cial thinking about waste in generalseems equally confused. Why levy depos­its to encourage the recycling of glass bot­tles but not plastic ones? Why control thedisposal of municipal waste in such detailbut allow utilities to pile up coal ash un­challenged? Why tax and regulate land�llsout of all proportion to the damage they doto the environment? The individual poli­cies do not add up to a grand design.

A desire to reduce the amount of wastebeing produced and to minimise the harmit does is all well and good, but govern­ments must be sure to encourage thoseends by the cheapest and most e�cientmeans. Plugging loopholes in the rules is agood �rst step. American o�cials shouldbe much stricter about coal­ash tips, re­gardless of how much clout utilities have

in Congress. Similarly, governmentsshould pay more attention to waste thatwinds up in the sea, even if it falls outsidetheir formal jurisdiction.

Emissions of greenhouse gases andother noxious chemicals are a worry. Butinstead of banning or heavily taxing par­ticular waste­disposal technologies to re­duce the emissions they produce, govern­ments should tax or limit emissions ingeneral. That would steer investors to­wards the cleanest technologies, whateverthey might be. Thus, instead of clampingdown on land�lls because of the methanethey produce, or incinerators for fear ofdioxins, governments should tackle meth­ane and dioxins across the board. If land­�lls and incinerators can meet the stan­dards they set, they should be welcomed.

Putting a price on greenhouse­gas emis­sions would also help to promote recy­cling. At the moment, it is often cheaper toprocess virgin materials, despite the extraenergy required, because collecting andsorting recyclables is so labour­intensive.

Recycling produces far fewer greenhousegases, but recycling �rms do not get muchbene�t out of that because their rivals paylittle or nothing for the emissions they pro­duce. In e�ect, governments are subsidis­ing the use of raw materials by failing tocharge big energy users for the emissionsthey cause. Scrapping that subsidy wouldprovide recycling �rms with a big boost.

Above all, regulators should be con­scious of the costs of the rules they laydown. Blanket bans, 100% targets and pu­nitive taxes are usually a sign of dogma­tism. It cannot be desirable for Californiato recycle absolutely everything. Theremust be some waste that is better burnt orburied. Construction and demolition, forexample, produce lots of inert waste thatcan be cheaper to put into land�ll than to�downcycle� into lower­value construc­tion materials. And there is nothing wrongwith burning wood or even some plastics,provided the right pollution controls are inplace. Politicians should prize value formoney above political correctness or rhe­torical �ourish.

Still, in their muddled and heavy­hand­ed way, governments are groping towardsthe idea of making the polluter pay by in­ternalising the cost of responsible wastedisposal. That is surely the right way to go.If governments oblige manufacturers to in­clude the cost of disposal in their prices,�rms will pass those costs on to consum­ers, who will have an incentive to buy theproducts that are the easiest to dispose ofand therefore cheapest. All this should pro­vide a spur to the waste industry andspeed the adoption of new technology.Firms like HP have seen the writing on thewall: waste is heading for a redesign. 7

It doesn’t have to be like this