Can landfills really be gone by 2030?

Environmental movements through the 70s and 80s introduced the topic of ecologically sustainable development. From the early 1990s with the introduction of the Kerbside Recycling Strategy and National Waste Minimisation Strategy the focus started to turn to recycling. This led to the waste management hierarchy. The hierarchy encourages the use of higher order options before the lower order options. In Europe, the drivers have been population pressure, land values and political incentives (aka levies and grants) which results in the economics of these tiers encouraging the hierarchy. The drivers in Australia have been much weaker resulting in the cost of these options encouraging disposal.  As waste managers, we have no control over avoidance – however, we do as consumers and procurers. Our reuse and recycling efforts have naturally focussed on the products with low recovery cost or high value. Setting recycling targets, providing grants for constructing transfer stations and landfill levies have all assisted in lowering recovery costs and diverting waste from landfill.

Over the past 9 years, waste generation has not increased on a per capita. Over this same period the recovery rate from waste has increased by 10% from around 50% to 60% whilst the tonnages disposed to landfill has decreased slightly.  

The war on waste has helped to gain public interest in recycling and re-use and put pressure on the producers to take responsibility for the recyclability of their inputs. The challenge for the waste management industry is to turn our attention to look for further improvements and apply our problem-solving skills to the more difficult waste streams to increase diversion from landfill to the ambitious target of over 90%. 

Quietly in the background a new paradigm has been gaining momentum - the circular economy. There are many diagrams of the circular economy, each one seemingly more complicated than the other. I like this one from GISA as it is simple and the circular economy is actually a simple philosophy. Basically the circular economy requires everyone in the circle to think about what recyclable inputs they can use (rather than virgin products) and what opportunities there are for their waste to become some else’s recyclable input. It seeks to drive economic growth by recycling rather than consuming finite resources and attempts to keep materials flowing between the various stakeholders at their highest value, i.e. recycling then recovery, treatment and finally disposal.

In its complete form there are no wastes so it could be suggested we are all out of a job.  So what is the role for waste managers in the circular economy? Waste managers in the circular economy, are there not just to accept the intractable waste, but to facilitate, plan, assist and manage waste. We have actually been doing this for years - we’ve designed and constructed facilities to sort the waste streams into recyclables, to treat soil and make compost and mulch. Our place is in the circular economy and we have a valuable role as we are the most experienced in waste management – not only disposal.

Will there be intractable waste? Of course there will be - even the waste to energy movement using incineration still has waste products which need to find a home. This will sometimes be a landfill, but what we send to landfill will be much harder to deal with than what we currently do.

To be capable of moving forward we need to understand our waste streams. Where do they come from, how do we collect them and how easy are they to separate? Can we improve on any of this?

What other industries around us that might have a use for these wastes? Or are there industries that if we combined their waste with ours it would become a valuable product?

This requires considerable thought and planning to be able to make the circular economy actually work and particularly in a country like Australia where we fight the distances between things. For the circular economy to work we need to consider how we plan our cities and towns to encourage the reuse and recycling of materials. We also need to make it easier.

When you compare Australian recycling with what occurs in other parts of the world you see that there is much improvement to be done. We use a co-mingled recycling process for household recycling. This makes it very difficult for reuse to occur because everything has to be separated and that adds cost at the recyclers end.

In many parts of Europe the recycling requires the disposer to do the sorting and actually makes it so that they have to think about what they are doing. Is Australia ready for something like this?

Whether we can do this or not the simple fact is that if we want to take advantage of the opportunities from the circular economy the quality of the waste needs to be improved.  Waste transfer stations are becoming and need to become more like material recovery facilities. Waste transfer stations are good for wastes which are already separated but to tackle those more difficult wastes, the ones that are all mixed up, we need to start thinking about technologically advancing our waste transfer stations to become material recovery facilities. Again, remember that these facilities are not a full-stop. We need to focus on where the wastes can be recycled to and then separate based on this. There are wastes from these that still need a home – be it used as mulches in restricted mining rehabilitation or waste to energy, once the more valuable products have been removed there are still low value products or products with contamination requiring disposal. 

The challenge and the opportunity is to embrace the circular economy and look at how we plan our industry. The challenge is to find markets for products that don’t exist today. The only way that we can deal with this is if Government and Industry collaborate on actually making our society the best it can be. Government and Industry working together to create a brighter future – sound utopic!

So, will landfills exist in the future? Unfortunately, yes they will. There will always be some waste streams that are going to fall into the dispose category. They will likely be highly contaminated and much trickier to manage than current.  This also means we will never reach true zero waste.

But the future of waste management is actually to be leading Government and Industry together to plan our future.