One of the most positive-sounding features of the Government Review of Waste Policy in England 2011 was the introduction of the Waste Prevention Loan Fund (WPLF), to “enable organisations to introduce business models and processes which make more efficient use of material resources.”
The Review put prevention front and centre of its rhetoric – but it left me with a nagging question about how Defra would tell whether this new prevention measure is working. This is important, not just to check that the policy’s aim is being achieved, but also because the loan is to be paid back once savings reach a prescribed threshold. Certainly there’s nothing in the Review to say how this will work, and even WRAP’s website is pretty thin on detail.
Made to measure?
From my point of view, prevention is one of the hardest things to assess – after all, you’re attempting to measure what didn’t happen, and what wasn’t produced. Nothing like so easy as measuring how much material was recycled or composted. Of course, on the large scale you can gather arisings figures – which have tended to show an inexorable upward trend – and look to correlate them with big policy initiatives. But we want to be able to look at the small scale too, if we’re going to assess the overall impact of measures like the WPLF.
There’s also the problem of ‘attributability’ – how do you know how much of any change is down to the measure you’re trying to assess, or is caused by something completely different. The recent economic downturn has tended to limit consumption, and even if you believe that GDP and waste arisings can be uncoupled, it seems pretty clear that the bleak macro-economic picture has helped to reduce waste – and no practicable amount of waste prevention is likely to stop the volume increasing again when the economy picks up.
Eunomia recently highlighted this data issue in a comparison of economic instruments promoting waste prevention for Brussels Environment. The authors found that “In many instances data on waste prevention is very limited as measurement of this has only become a significant priority over recent years.” Indeed, the availability of evidence was one of the criteria that had to be used to select instruments for in-depth consideration, and even where information could be obtained it was not often easily comparable.
Whilst WRAP does seem to be implementing an element of monitoring of resource-efficient business models, it is not transparent how the efficiency and effectiveness of the WPLF is going to be evaluated. The conundrum is one that WRAP and Defra will have to address if they’re going to seriously assess the impact of the loan fund.
Detailed policy analysis relies on collecting high quality data– and the fundamental requirement is to be able to compare what actually happened with a credible estimate of what would have happened. Waste prevention policies need an up front analysis of their expected impact. It may be difficult, but for those comfortable with data modelling and counterfactual analyses, the production of tailored, credible models of prevention is possible.
Alison – you raise a real problem in assessing the success of waste prevention activities, but I think it is worth getting some perspective on the WPLF. It is not very large so its direct impacts won’t be either. It is designed to stimulate people to think about different ways of doing business – its success should be measured by how many new business models are tested as a result of it and how many get taken up for real. The impact on total resource use will arise from the extent to which any successful models are picked up and applied by other businesses and in many cases keith WRAP nor anyone else in Government will know about that. The fund is designed to stimulate new ideas – let’s measure that first.
Ali, I completely agree. I think effective measurement of waste prevention is going to become a really important issue for all EU Member States as they seek to implement the requirements of the revised Waste Framework Directive. Developing robust ex ante assessments might seem like a lot of effort, particularly when the interventions themselves are relatively low cost, but they do help to get a good understanding of the relative cost-effectiveness of different approaches to waste prevention.