Is waste prevention bad for the economy?

The G8 leaders’ announcement of a renewed emphasis on promoting economic growth may have been widely welcomed – but for those of us keen to see an economy that better reflects the waste hierarchy it raises an interesting question. Does better waste management tend to promote or reduce growth and employment?

A number of studies have looked at the impact that different waste treatment methods have on employment, and the results are initially encouraging for those who believe that if we’re to have growth then it has to be green. The evidence suggests that as you move up the hierarchy from landfill through recycling to reuse, the number of jobs needed increases.

Recycling jobs

For example, the US-based organisation Cascadia conducted a review of studies and found that, per tonne processed, recycling provides approximately ten times more jobs than landfilling.  It is easy to understand how recycling creates jobs – it takes more effort to collect and separate waste out into its component streams and reprocess it than does to deposit it unsorted into a hole in the ground, and each step along the way creates work for someone. The employment benefits of preparing for reuse are perhaps more difficult to see. After all, when something is reused it avoids the new goods, and the jobs that this production creates. But research I’ve found shows that preparing items for reuse seems to be associated with a still larger number of employees per tonne of material processed, with one source reporting that repairing 10,000 tonnes of computers would support as many as 296 jobs, whereas landfilling the same tonnage would need only one worker.

The waste hierarchy

But can we conclude from this that the best employment opportunities arise at the top of the hierarchy, through waste prevention? Definitions become a little tangled here – the revised Waste Framework Directive counts some types of reuse as waste prevention. Its distinction between ‘reuse’ and ‘preparation for reuse’ is subtle – in the latter case, the reused items have entered the waste stream, while in the former they haven’t. For example, a TV delivered to your local CA site becomes waste and may then be ‘prepared for’ reuse. The same TV donated to a charity for repair is simply reused and therefore classed as waste prevention.

This technical distinction may have value in some contexts, but here the key thing is whether an item requires preparation to allow it to be reused, or can be reused straight away. The former kind of reuse may be lower down the hierarchy, but supports jobs in repair and refurbishment. The latter simply obviates the need for new items and can therefore be argued to have a negative impact on employment opportunities. But the literature is largely devoid of evidence that links waste prevention to economic and employment numbers, so this concern is not backed by any solid data.

Survival of the efficient

Free market capitalism’s logic requires economic growth in order to maintain its stability. This is because In the Darwinian world of business, the company with the most efficient business processes should be able to create its product at the lowest cost, enabling it to attract more clients and make more money than its competitors. Increased efficiency, however, has an unfortunate side effect: whether it is brought about by new technology or better labour productivity, efficiency decreases the need for paid labour.

Growth is needed in order to ‘mop up’ the people made redundant by increased efficiency and provide them with employment. This logic underlies the way governments continually try to ensure that their countries’ economies expand and grow. The social consequences of stagnant or negative growth have been made evident by the economic downturn, and we are frequently reminded of the need to consume in order to keep the economy moving.

Waste prevention would seem to either reduce economic output by pushing down demand– we dispose of less stuff, and buy less new stuff to replace it – or to function like any other kind of efficiency benefit, reducing the need for labour. It sounds like bad news for those hoping to see green growth.

However, this prognosis needs to be tempered with two further thoughts. One is that the upstream and downstream impacts of waste prevention are complicated – how do we factor in the value of research and development that aims to achieve waste prevention, or the economic activity resulting from waste prevention campaigns? It may not be easy to prove the effects of waste prevention but this is an area that would repay research.

The second is that, if there is found to be a conflict between waste prevention and economic expansion, we don’t have to conclude that this is a black mark against waste prevention. Perhaps the terms in which we are measuring economic success are part of the problem. Indeed, one of the more encouraging things that are being talked about by Defra in the run up to the Rio Earth Summit 2012 is the need to advance beyond GDP as a measure of our economy. The proposed alternative measure, GDP+, would also account for the value of countries’ natural resources and the social wellbeing of their people – on which measures, reuse and waste prevention may score rather better than they do on GDP alone.