Waste disposal data should be public data

If you ever care to look up the licence of a landfill or other waste disposal facility, you’ll find that whilst there might be a requirement to report how much waste it received, that data is rarely public.

The data is secret because “commercial in confidence”.

That’s not good enough.

Waste disposal facilities are handling materials that are borrowed from the public domain, the commons. Materials that the operator looks to return to the commons in the form of landfill or air emissions.

We need to know how much waste is disposed, and what sort of waste is disposed.

Furthermore, since waste disposal is the lowest rung on the waste hierarchy, we should be able to interrogate those disposal actions.

We need fine grained data on what goes to a disposal facility (waste type, customer, tonnes). Public and readily available data so that we can look it up for ourselves. Those with a better option than disposal can win those materials across.

Waste disposal is infrastructure that should be used as a last resort, minimised because everything else has been attempted. It should not be something that is maximised to boost profits.

The best way to make sure waste disposal is only used where necessary is to publicly explain its use.

The best way to realise the opportunities in waste is to publish what currently goes for disposal.

The best way to gain collective insight is to share knowledge.

To quote from the book A Good Disruption

The mechanisms of a circular system are simply different. In the cases of steel and plastics, for example, keeping the material value high would require actions such as better recovery, tracking and recycling systems, improved secondary material markets, bans on certain toxins and perhaps extended producer responsibilities.

The starting point for this journey is to open our eyes.

The first step to show the riches before us.