Designing for Zero Waste

Consumption, Technologies and the Built Environment

Steffen Lehmann,Robert Crocker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136507533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Sostenibilidad en la arquitectura

Designing for Zero Waste is a timely, topical and necessary publication. Materials and resources are being depleted at an accelerating speed and rising consumption trends across the globe have placed material efficiency, waste reduction and recycling at the centre of many government policy agendas, giving them an unprecedented urgency. While there has been a considerable literature addressing consumption and waste reduction from different disciplinary perspectives, the complex nature of the problem requires an increasing degree of interdisciplinarity. Resource recovery and the optimisation of material flow can only be achieved alongside and through behaviour change to reduce the creation of material waste and wasteful consumption. This book aims to develop a more robust understanding of the links between lifestyle, consumption, technologies and urban development.

Part I

---

Zero waste, sustainability and behaviour change

Principles

---

Chapter 1

‘Somebody else’s Problem’

Consumer Culture, Waste and Behaviour Change – the Case of Walking

Robert Crocker

Summary

Most efforts at improving the sustainability of our products, systems and environments are currently focused on their role in consumption and use. This ‘consumption’ focus, broadly defined here to include the consumption and use of raw materials and services, necessarily distances us from the natural environment or ‘commons’ from which various desired materials are extracted and into which — once processed and used — these are later discarded as ‘waste’. It also tends to silence our pre-existing relationship to, and dependence on, each other and our local environments, as these too are reduced to producing some economic value conceived of in relation to consumption. What remains outside this ‘consumption frame’ becomes ‘somebody else’s problem’, but increasingly our environmental crisis is forcing us to question the effects of this narrow focus.

Using the sporadic but ongoing example of government attempts to get more people out of their cars and walking, this chapter argues that progress towards greater sustainability in this and many other instances can only occur when a ‘socialization’ of behaviour change can occur, that is when the social normalization of a desired behaviour becomes habitual, and any barriers, either structural or behavioural, to this desired change are minimized or removed. In the case of walking, this requires a substantial revision of the traditional methods and concerns of the traffic engineer, and a return to the local scale of ‘walkable’ environments and short journeys envisaged by the urban designer. Recalling ten years’ personal involvement in pedestrian safety advocacy, this chapter reflects upon the experiences of local communities confronted with the dominant system’s barriers to walkable local environments and considers the successful ‘socialized’ strategies that have been developed to get people out of their cars and into these environments as walkers.

Introduction: Consumption, ‘Distance’ and Responsibility

In Douglas Adams’s sci-fi novel, Life, the universe and everything (1982), space engineers, faced with the expensive challenge of making a spaceship invisible for defensive purposes, decide to go for a new, cheaper option, a technology wryly named ‘somebody else’s problem’. This makes the spaceship in question not really invisible, but ‘almost’ so, through the device of the observer’s inattention. Instead of seeing a ship clearly or not seeing it at all, Adams’s ship can only be seen with great difficulty out of the corner of one’s eye (Adams, 1982, pp28–9). Like many of the background systems we take for granted, such as the supply of water, electricity and gas to our homes and the weekly rubbish collection, along with the roadways that enable our car-based commute to and from work, we seem to be able to focus only on the ‘consumption phase’ in the life cycle of any particular domain. Everything else outside the parameters of what we now take for granted becomes ‘somebody else’s problem’, something perhaps ‘they’ should do something about, sooner or later.

Indeed, most of our more serious environmental problems now seem to be ‘somebody else’s problem’. A conceptual distancing or ‘distantiation’ is apparent in our awareness of, not only the origins and ordinary functioning of the things and services we use on a daily basis, but also what happens to them when they fail to function or when we no longer need them. The ‘stuff’ we use and enjoy appears in our lives almost magically, often having been transported thousands of kilometres in trucks, trains and planes, from processing, manufacturing and distribution locations hidden from us behind barcodes, brochures, branded labels and the ‘fine print’ on packages or delivery notes (Princen, 2002b). While even as children we can identify the logos and brands of well-known products, and retell the simple myths they recount, the real origins, life cycle, technical function in use and ‘end-of-life’ destination of these same products and services have been skilfully airbrushed out of the picture. This is not a product of corporate conspiracy but the result of long-term historical processes that have transformed our relationship to the world of goods: from being a much smaller population of face-to-face ‘customers’, of small shop, workshop and farm-based providers, over about 150 years we have become a ‘side-to-side’ army of consumers, dependent on vast, often global, mass-production and mass-distribution systems, whose complexity and lengthy supply chains render them opaque to us (Strasser, 2003). This means that, even if we wanted as individuals to do something about many of the downsides of our vastly distanced global production and distribution system, there is usually insufficient information available to us to act with any certainty or clarity of purpose (Princen, 2002a; 2002b; 2005).

For example, in New York or London, the delicious fresh tuna on our plate in a restaurant may have come from the other side of the world, pulled out of the sea perhaps only three days ago, and flown thousands of kilometres to us on ice to retain its freshness (de Botton, 2009, pp53ff.). The modern miracle of the logistics responsible for bringing the tuna to our plate remains concealed, but its extraordinary costs, in fuel, emissions and energy, not to mention its impact on the tuna’s population and the distant habitat in which it lived, are unknowable to us and remain silenced by this conceptual distance (Paché, 2007). Worse, there is no visible global oversight of the shared natural environment or ‘commons’ from which this tuna has been extracted, just as there are no effective global limits to our profligate use of other increasingly limited natural resources (Conca, 2008). As we eat our tuna, we can have no certainty that the fish was farmed or caught responsibly, and it remains a possibility that it was taken by ‘illegal’ fishermen and then somehow ‘legalized’ on paper during its journey to the restaurant (Bestor, 2003). Extraction and distribution, whether of tuna, oil, timber or diamonds, occur on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, with the richest, most technologically sophisticated or most powerful getting in first, staking a ‘claim’ and taking a ‘share’ that may create serious problems for the rest of us in the future (Princen, 2003; 2005). It is perhaps no wonder that there has been a substantial decline in public trust closely coinciding with this self-evident triumph of globalization (Putnam, 2000; Hardin, 2006).

Waste products, like the resources and by-products from which our food, clothing and other ‘stuff are made, are largely hidden from us, and we have developed efficient disposal systems and corresponding metaphors to ensure that what is discarded is taken away and disposed of, ‘out of sight, and so out of mind’ (Clapp, 2002; Princen, 2010). The environmental costs of over-extraction, over-consumption and excessive pollution and waste, like the real costs of our road toll, for example, are never made transparent to us, but can only be made visible with considerable effort, against a prevailing culture of ‘use and enjoy, dispose and forget’. Part of the problem is economic ‘externalization’, where costs are shifted so that environmental ‘debts’ can pile up and be passed on, back to the population living on the ‘frontier’ from whence the ‘resource’ was first extracted, or where the items in question were manufactured (Princen, 2002b; Smart, 2010, pp110ff.). Just as transport departments around the world do not have to pay for the costs of road accidents, such as emergency medical staff, ambulances, surgery, insurance, or deal with the many personal tragedies, grief and suffering caused by most serious accidents, so miners, manufacturers and other producers, shippers and retailers, and the many consumers at the end of our lengthy and complex supply chains, usually do not have to pay for the environmental costs embedded in the ‘stuff’ they are using, or the waste it will eventually become (Frascara, 1996).

The problem is not only one of distantiation and the inevitable concealment from view that comes with lengthy supply chains, but also the way that our present economic system focuses attention and attributes value only at the ‘owned’ consumption or ‘inuse’ phase of any life cycle, and then only on the specific owner and the ‘job’ in question. This leads to a crisis of oversight and responsibility: we are accustomed to efficiently managing and focusing upon only what is ‘owned’ by some identifiable person, corporation or nation in its use phase. However, we seem unable to deal with what is there before this ‘resource’ is ‘claimed’ and then ‘owned’ at the beginning of this cycle, or what happens to the consumed material at its end, when it is turned again into what is ‘unowned’ or unwanted. For no one wants to ‘own’ garbage, unless it has some special material value, and when this is not identified it returns again to the commons, to what technically has not yet been given value or ‘owned’ (Strasser, 2000; Linebaugh, 2010). As Princen points out, much of this depends on widely accepted and unquestioned metaphors taken directly from economics and misapplied in the ‘real world’ of human and environmental relationships (Princen, 2010).

Witness the ‘great Pacific garbage patch’ made up of plastics and other industrial products floating in the northern Pacific gyre, which has become a hazard to shipping and wildlife and is now so large it can be seen from space (Moore, 2003; Coulter, 2009-10; Wikipedia, 2011). It lies beyond the responsibility of any government, ship owner or industrial producer and remains, mysteriously, without a determining or responsible cause, very much ‘somebody else’s problem’. But, as Moore and others have pointed out, while this continent-sized patch of floating garbage might damage many distant fish and birds directly, its toxins affect us too, entering the food chain and becoming a part of what we eat, perhaps thousands of miles distant, its tell-tale toxins now being identifiable in many commercially caught and consumed fish (Moore, 2003).

Distantiation and externalization have also become serious problems when it comes to more ‘normal’ waste and pollution issues, because, while what might be associated with the interests of a government or a corporation can be represented and dealt with fairly efficiently, what lies in the interests of everyone beyond this consumption or use phase seems to elude most systems of governance and consumption-focused economic thinking, just as it eludes our ability to focus on them in our daily lives. Like many ‘undiscovered’ resources and much waste, what lies in our metaphorically distanced biosphere or commons becomes obscure and tenuous, a global ‘frontier’ (Princen, 2002b; Linebaugh, 2010). Typically, this then becomes open to a free-for-all competition between corporate actors whose interests might include mining or exploiting an identified ‘resource’ within an area of the commons. These often operate under ‘flags of convenience’ or some similar ‘legal’ fiction to limit responsibility for the environmental damage caused by their exploration or extraction, as was the case in the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (Princen, 2005; Courselle, 2010). As Maniates, Princen and others have argued, it is vital that we come to grips collectively with the lack of social and environmental responsibility embedded in the now global political, economic and legal infrastructures that foster and support this ‘frontier mentality’, rather than simply treating it as an abstract theoretical problem, involving only the ‘pricing’ of untapped natural resources, as though they can be magically reconstituted by some future technological wizardry (Maniates, 2002; Princen, 2002b; Conca, 2008).

The central metaphor for this distantiation and externalization I want to return to later in this chapter is that of walking in relation to the automobile: through the perceptual window provided by consumption we have been led to assume there is more economic and social value in driving than in walking, that, without the ‘flexibility’ and ‘freedom’ the car provides, many economic benefits will be lost or closed to us. We also assume that driving (or being driven) is socially as well as technologically more ‘advanced’ and therefore more important, and more worthy of investment than ‘just’ walking, something suggested by the metaphorical meaning often applied to the word ‘pedestrian’. At present, the social and environmental costs of driving or being driven are nearly all externalized to the larger community and natural environment, to the commons from which the oil used to power cars is extracted, to the polluted air, water and environment created by our car dependence, and the ‘sprawl’ this dependence locks in place.

In aiming for zero waste, the car is an extremely problematic object of consumption: however ‘advanced’ we might be able to make it in the future, reducing its emissions to zero, and cleverly engineering its shell and guidance system until it is ‘perfectly safe’ (for those others, presumably, in their cars), it is still one of the world’s most economically expensive and environmentally and socially destructive products, with one of its most significant and least considered costs being its direct restriction of walking. For, when we can drive we usually do, and this discourages us from walking (thus creating the grounds for many health problems in those driving or being driven, including obesity, diabetes and other, stress-related disorders), especially when we live or work in urban environments where other cars dominate, travel distances are great, public transport is limited and walking is a socially stigmatized, dangerous and unpleasant option (Hass-Klau, 1990; Freund and Martin, 1993; Litman, 2011).

The everyday domain of personal transport and the car’s hold on it provides a particularly useful lens through which to examine the problem of behaviour change, partly because it has been so thoroughly documented and discussed in a very large literature involving many different disciplines (Paterson, 2000; Davison and Yelland, 2004), but also because it directly impacts on the problem of our waste stream: cars and other road-based vehicles are large objects producing tonnes of environmental waste, including around 20 per cent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, with much of it extremely toxic and contributing directly to climate change (for a summary of 2007 global figures, see CAIT, 2011). Cars are also deadly weapons, killing each year, in both America and Australia, proportionally as many people as were killed during our ten-year involvement in the Vietnam War, and maiming a similar proportion too (Sharma, 2008; Australian Government, 2009). Recent figures suggest that the annual road toll worldwide is approaching 1.5 million people, with around 50 million people maimed, a population the size of a significa...