Talking about waste prevention
The amount of waste we produce has steadily increased over the last century. In carbon terms, most of the impact from manufactured goods is bound up in its production. So avoiding the need to produce things in the first place should be our main priority.
Waste prevention is a sensitive topic as it affects how we choose to live our lives. Take convenience food packaging for example. Due to changes in our society, more of us are going to work and working longer hours. With fewer hours spare to prepare food, ready or semi-processed meals become a more attractive and convenient option.
But when you ask people to try to reduce their packaging waste by buying less convenience food, this can be viewed as a step too far - as something that will impact negatively on their lives by removing that convenience factor.
Despite these sensitivities, waste prevention is an area where, with a few simple changes in consumer habits, levels of waste can be greatly reduced.
So what is the best way to talk to people about reducing their waste? Well firstly, it should be about small actions you can do easily, rather than telling people what they shouldn't do. The Love Food Hate Waste campaign is a great start; full of ideas and tips for people to take positive action to reduce their food waste.
Many local authorities with higher recycling rates have turned their attention to waste prevention, with campaigns focussing on food waste, reuse and composting. But measuring the impact of these campaigns can be problematic; the fundamental problem being how can you measure something that isn't actually there - in other words, the waste that has been avoided?
These campaigns are first steps in a whole new stage of our conversation with the public about waste. Government needs to understand that, whatever the technical issues with measurement, waste prevention must be the ultimate goal of any waste policy, and the sooner we start engaging more widely with the public on this the better.
We need to clearly show people the relationship between waste reduction, reuse and recycling, and position waste prevention as a distinct goal, separate and even more important than recycling.
Communications campaigns that encourage behaviour change will not drive down levels of waste production alone. We need to bring in policies that reward people for wasting less, including those that are currently politically contentious but are vital to reduce overall waste, such as Pay-As-You-Throw schemes.
Waste prevention is still a relatively new area. As this week's European statistics show, none of our European neighbours have seriously grasped this nettle yet, despite leading the UK in recycling for many years. But preventing waste is unquestionably the goal of sustainable waste management. It is now time to up our game once more and get the public ready for a whole new level of debate.
