Seminar: Waste and human behavior

Transcription

1 Seminar: Waste and human behavior Division of Water Resources Engineering, Lund University 31 March :30 16:15 Seminar room N1, V Building, John Ericssons väg 1, Lund Program 13:30-13:35 Introduction 13:35-14:05 The business Model of Swedish Municipal Waste Management Companies. Hervé Corvellec, Department of Service Management, Lund University 14:05-14:35 Social Implications of the European Union Waste Hierarchy. Johan Hultman, Department of Service Management, Lund University 14:35-14:55 Coffee 14:55-15:25 Switching Managua on! Connecting Forgotten Landscapes to the City. Maria-Jose Zapata, GRI (Gothenburg Research Institute), Gothenburg University 15:25-15:55 Municipal Solid Waste and Recycling Initiatives, the Case in Jordan. Mohammad Aljaradin, Division of Water Resources Engineering, Lund University 15:55-16:15 Concluding discussion Information We kindly ask all participants to register so we know how much coffee and cake to prepare. For registration and questions please contact: Hanna Modin, Division of Water Resources Engineering Hanna.modin@tvrl.lth.se

2 Paper 1: The Business Model of Swedish Municipal Waste Management Companies Hervé Corvellec*, Torleif Bramryd and Johan Hultman Department of Service Management Lund University * author for correspondence: herve.corvellec@ism.lu.se This paper describes the business model of two influential Swedish municipal waste management companies. A comparative study of these case companies shows that they combine three types of activities: public service activities to take in waste from households and industry, processing activities to transform this waste, and marketing activities that let processed material re-enter the economy. The historical success of the two companies rests on an ability to combine these three distinct although mutually dependent types of activities. However, an ongoing legal controversy may develop into a threat to this business model and to the organisation of Swedish waste management as a whole.

3 Paper 2: Social Implications of the European Union Waste Hierarchy Johan Hultman* & Herve Corvellec Department of Service Management Lund University * author for correspondence: Johan.Hultman@ism.lu.se Traditionally, waste has been defined as a socio-material problem to be cognitively and geographically removed and hidden from those who produce it. But the place of waste in society waste is changing. Waste has become increasingly visible in various manifestations: litter, large infrastructures such as landfills or incineration plants, recycling centers, multi-compartment bins and CO2 taxes. Waste has also become more attractive. Many companies and even countries are eager to take possession of waste. It is not only a matter of generating income from waste disposal services. It is also a matter of getting in a position to take advantage of the material value of waste. The European Union environmental policy is illustrative of this gradual shift from waste as problem to waste as resource. The EU has articulated a prescriptive model called the waste hierarchy (henceforth TWH). TWH expresses principles of minimizing environmental harm from waste management from best to worst waste management option in five practice-oriented steps. At the top of this hierarchy is waste prevention, followed by product reuse, recycling or composting, energy recovery by incineration, and finally disposal that represents the least attractive waste management approach. TWH implies significant consequences for waste management principles and practices in the future as waste must be increasingly sorted, differentiated and circulated. TWH proposes to order new waste materialities and spatialities throughout the EU. But the consequences of new understandings of waste have not been a focus in social sciences research. In particular, virtually no social research has been made on how TWH s call for waste prevention and product reuse might entail changing practices of design, production and consumption of products and services. TWH is indeed an illustration of when it comes to connecting waste to the Sustainable Consumption and Production agenda, waste research remains trapped by increasingly anachronistic understandings, and the policy agenda is often ahead of waste research. TWH can be said to promote a new socio-materiality of waste, but how this is done and which kind of socio-materiality this involves remains largely under-theorized.

4 Addressing this under-theorization, this presentation will argue that in socio-material terms, TWH challenges dichotomous understandings of economy/environment and society/nature. The priority in TWH for waste prevention and product reuse goes against the traditional understanding that economy equals a linear and unidirectional way from production to consumption to waste. Instead, TWH calls for the creation of new connections between pre- and post-commodity phases of material assemblages that point towards a new politics of production and of consumption.

5 Paper 3: Switching Managua on! Connecting Forgotten Wastescapes to the City Maria-Jose Zapata GRI (Gothenbrg Research Institute) Gothenburg University Author for correspondence: During the last decades the waste management municipal service of the city of Managua has been confined to the collection of waste in the formal city. By contrast, almost half of the city population lives in spontaneous settlements: illegal slums disconnected from most public services as roads, pavements, water, sewage, standard housing, street cleaning or waste collection. The modern municipal waste trucks, donated by different international aid organisations, are not appropriate to enter into the informal city, due to their narrow alleys and multitude of hanging cables and other hinders. The waste management municipal service has also been limited to the disposal of waste at La Chureca, the municipal garbage dump, where no kind of transformation has been made. Instead, 2000 people and 600 children have been working daily in the dump to recover the valuable materials from the garbage. The result is that an important part of the city is out of waste collecting service and, accordingly, much of the city s waste ends up in clandestine dumps where it causes sickness, smell and harbours vermin, or in open water canals where it provokes flooding during the rain season. Similarly, Managua s garbage dump, La Chureca, has caused serious problems of air, soil and water contamination during the last four decades. The spontaneous settlements around and even in La Chureca garbage dump itself, where 300 families live and 2000 people work to recover valuables from the waste, are connected to the informal waste market but disconnected from the formal city and its services. The city of Managua has recently involved itself in a number of urban development projects related to the city s waste management, all funded by aid development organisations. These projects deal with the sealing of La Chureca s dump and the regeneration of its slum; the construction of a new sanitary landfill and a waste transformation station; the construction of a number of waste transference stations in the city districts as a process of decentralization of the waste management municipal service; campaigns to rouse the awareness of the local population; eradication of child-labour related to waste collection; elimination of illegal dumping and the

6 improvement of public health; and the establishment of micro-enterprises and cooperatives for collecting, recycling and transforming household solid waste in neighbourhoods out of the reach of the formal municipal service. In the paper I will explore how the implementation of these urban development projects connects the informal and the formal city of Managua through the waste management service. The preliminary findings show how Managua city s waste management system is being transformed into a hybrid of formal and informal services, public and private suppliers, modern and traditional technologies. In the paper I will argue that the formal-modern and the informaltraditional waste collection services are assemblaged through the transformation of illegal waste transference points into formal waste transference stations, situated at the hinge between the formal and the informal city. Illegal waste transference points are those places where waste is transferred from the household collectors the householders themselves to the municipality such as clandestine dumps or river sides, which once or twice a year will be cleaned by the municipality, and finally disposed in the municipal dump. These waste transference points are crossing points: places of semiotic, discursive, material, and socio-organisational transformations of waste. Accordingly, how this process of transferring waste is being organised, transferred and transformed (both at the transference points and at the municipal dump) has a number of implications for issues of environmental sustainability, public health, recovery of economic added value of waste or decent work. Through the new waste transference stations created by the urban development projects the informal and traditional waste collection services succeeded to switch on the disconnected parts of the city, the spontaneous and forgotten settlements, to the formal city, in a more sustainable manner.

7 Paper 4: Municipal Solid Waste Situation and Recycling Initiatives, the Case in Jordan. Mohammad Aljaradin*, Kenneth M Persson Division of Water Resources Engineering Lund University * author for correspondence: Mohammad.Aljaradin@tvrl.lth.se Jordan has seen a large increase in population during the past five decades as a result of population growth and forced migrations, and also, accompanied with this increase, a cultural and economical development that has improved the standard of living and changing consumer habits in the community, resulting in a clear increase in the volume of waste. These changes urges the need for finding proper ways of making the living conditions for the people of Jordan more sustainable, recycling has been adopted as an important way to reduce waste and ease the use of landfills in many courtiers of the world. The residential area is a good place to start and practice recycling as a substantial part of all waste is generated there every day. This paper examines the level of willingness and awareness of recycling of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) among residential, with specific focus on university students. for this extend two surveys have been conducted, the first designed to pattern the people views on recycling of MSW and to test their willing for recycling, but also to examine their knowledge and awareness of recycling befits on a social, economical and environmental basis. The second was designed to demonstrate the role of scavengers and their effect on the waste management process.