A Multi-Level Perspective on Waste Management in Pittsburgh
Team Complexity | Bhakti Shah, Christianne Francovitch, Christopher Costes, Donna Maione
Introduction
From the beginning of trying to understand the wicked problem of waste management in Pittsburgh, it was clear that the problem was not a recent one. Many of its contributing factors could be mapped back decades and even centuries. In an attempt to reveal how these historical factors contribute to present-day problems and how they might be leveraged to provide solutions, we employed the method of multi-level perspective (MLP). This technique, introduced by F. W. Geels in 2005, seeks to “understand how transitions from one socio-technical system to another come about,” and has the potential to show the transitions not only across time but also between levels of sophistication. Applying this method of understanding socio-technical systems allowed us to develop a clearer understanding of the historical context of the management of waste in Pittsburgh. The insights produced by this analysis resulted in the identifications of productive niches and current initiatives already at work within Pittsburgh. Importantly, this study identifies possible interventions, through the lens of Donella Meadows’ leverage points as places to impact new systems-level changes.
The History of Waste’s Factors Set within the Levels of Niche, Regime, and Landscape:
In our first examination of waste as a wicked problem within Pittsburgh, we divided the problem between its individual participants and the action of corporations. As we turned back the clock on waste in Pittsburgh, we also found divides between people and industry; however, the MLP enabled us to unify these contributors and apply them across different levels of complexity and structure. These levels are divided into three levels, niches at the micro level, regimes at the meso level, and landscapes at the macro level. Niches are accounted for through radical innovations and are often small informal groups who take risks and challenge norms. Niche innovators can prove to be one of the essential aspects uncovered by this technique because they form the building blocks for more considerable system-wide changes when situations or shocks to the macro level render a system unstable. Regimes constitute the materials networks that are stable and are supported by rules set by multiple sources such as culture, law, or institutional norms. At the landscape level are the “wider exogenous environments that affect socio-technical development,” which represent frameworks that are difficult to deviate or escape. Landscapes are the forces and events that go far beyond the power of actors to change (451). As we move forward, we will showcase the most prominent historical events and factors contributed by individuals, industry, and government that demonstrate the influence between the levels of MLP in the context of waste management.
1800–1900 Industrialization, the expansion of urban population and the need for sanitation and waste management services
Niche (Micro Level)
Health and Water Sanitation
In 1854, a physician, John Snow, disproved the common belief known as the miasma theory, that diseases originate in rotting organic matter and spread through foul odors, by plotting the water faucets in a neighborhood in London that was affected by the deadly cholera outbreak. When the taps shut off closest to those that were infected, the disease stopped spreading. This discovery marked one of the first movements connecting water quality and public health, particularly how much human waste was present. While belief in miasma was still the predominant theory and notions around germs were nearly five decades away, this discovery would begin to affect how cities managed the human waste produced. Ironically, Pittsburgh from 1880–1910, would construct sewers to divert the city’s effluence into its surrounding rivers, beginning a trend of contamination that is still in effect.
Prepackaged Goods
Another important niche innovation was the invention of tin-cans in 1818. They were first used by British merchant Peter Durand, which allowed for the preservation of food for long-distance shipping. The tin-can significantly extends the shelf life of perishable foods. It also made it possible to warehouse and sell perishable items that are easily stackable on shelves in dramatic new ways. Decades later, this niche would give rise to the H. J. Heinz Company in Pittsburgh, which made its fortune by producing prepackaged food, remains today a regime-level institution responsible for multi-national processed foods. Food storage trends would lead to the retail grocery store and mass-produced quantities of consumer goods that were accompanied by disposable packaging associated with food preservation and consumer-produced waste.
Carnegie Steel Company
While it would not come into its own as a significant factor in Pittsburgh’s waste until years later, the Carnegie Steel Company came to Pittsburgh in 1892. For nearly a century, the manufacturing giant would hold sway over the city and swell its streets with people who had disposable income to buy goods and add to the building waste stream. While the wealth created by the company would provide a basis for many of the consumer trends, the steel plant ultimate closure would also add to the landscape of abandoned properties that became later the sites for illegal dumping.
Regime (Meso Level)
Clean Drinking Water
At the regime level, we see the acceptance of John Snow’s innovative use of mapping to identify sources of contaminants in the water system. To this effect, public health officials in the 1890s recommended that Pittsburgh provide services for improved water sanitation through filtering. In 1897, Allen Hazen, an MIT engineer, appointed a council who supported the implementation of a slow sand-filtration system for the city’s freshwater. Its completion would be at the beginning of the next century, and it remained in use until the 1950s when new technologies updated the system.
Dense Urban Population and Increased Imported Goods
By 1850, the landscape of a dense urban population was increased to meet the labor demands of the Industrial revolution. With the increase in population, so did the need for goods to be imported into the city stabilizing innovations into the regime level, such as the tin can. This regime structure appeared in Pittsburgh and ultimately contributed to the waste within the city through the advent, and the increase of more imported goods. With expensive items from around the country and the world making their way to Pittsburgh, the world also saw waste begin to accumulate in ways that had never been seen. So much to this fact that in 1900, the federal public works established the very first garage removal. It was beginning the trend of waste displacement as a means of waste removal. This trend toward prepackaged food began in the early 1800s and continues today in proportions that are too large to manage effectively and environmentally. In the centuries before pre-packed meals and Amazon, shipping waste management needs in Pittsburgh began to grow as more imported goods flooded the city.
Landscape (Macro Level)
Disease Caused by Poor infrastructure leads to Sanitation Services
During the 1800s, two notable landscape events affected Pittsburgh involving public health outbreaks. The Cholera epidemic from 1832–1866 and in the latter part of the century, the Typhoid epidemic. Both shocked the landscape, which gave way to the emerging niche innovations that became entrenched at the regime -level. These events helped to shape much of the new sanitation services in Pittsburgh’s formative years.
Industrial Revolution and The Toilers of the Machines
In the mid-1800s, Pittsburgh was a major industrial city. The landscape, from a geological perspective, made this city ideal for rapid growth in mass production. Pittsburgh’s rivers were an asset in the transportation of manufactured goods, and the coal seam resting directly under the city, the largest in the western Pennsylvania region, was a valuable source of power and electricity. This combination of transportation and energy sources created a uniquely dynamic structure that allowed the invention of interchangeable parts to become the model of mass production that provided jobs for unskilled workers in assemblage plants.
1901–1940
Niche (Micro Level)
Paper Wrapper Goods
With the turn of the century, many new inventions arose as a means to meet ever-growing consumers’ desire for convenience. One of them was wax paper, first used to wrap bread. While this innocent creation was not a problem at the time, it would later grow to introduce the world to packing goods in new and ever-expanding ways.
Buying it from the Store
During this period, general stores had already begun to stock their shelves with prepackaged goods, the scale at which this was happening was not yet what it is today. Two niche innovations, the first self-service grocery store in 1916, and supermarket in 1926, created by the same man, Clarence Sanders quickly took hold at the regime level, as the common method for shopping. Pittsburgh would see the rise of this in the same wave as did the rest of the country. As the popularity of supermarkets grew, food companies competed for shelf space by using their packaging as places for marketing. This furthered the dependence on packaging beyond the food safety and protection aspect.
New Inventions
While the implications for waste and a global problem weren’t obvious at the time, the early 1900s saw the creation of both plastic in 1907 and cardboard in 1903. Both would allow the expansion of waste through the century (and beyond) and become two of the biggest components of Pittsburgh’s current garbage problem.
Regime (Meso Level)
A Solutions Market Saturation Begins
Within the regime level, 1924 brings to Pittsburgh and the world an automobile market that is saturated. To address this system-wide problem, car-makers began to plan for obsolescence, introducing newer and (not very) different models each year as a way to increase sales. This trend would quickly take hold of many industries and give rise to untold levels of waste as consumers tried to follow a new-is-better mindset.
The Start of Recycling
One of the better trends to come from the early 1900s was the Waste Reclamation Service, which started in 1917 during WWI. Its motto: “ Don’t waste waste, save it”. This federal prompt encouraged the effort to produce as little waste as possible within the industry. Later this would give rise to acts like recycling and reclaiming materials for alternative purposes. It also started trends through American manufacturing to find new purposes for every part of their process. Some of these resulted in amazing new products, many of which would be made from highly processed material and nearly impossible to break down organically.
WWII Gives Rise to Plastic
With so many of the nation’s resources going to the war effort, 1940 saw manufacture desperate for new material. One of these would be plastic. From clothes to food containers to individual packaging, this would be the start of our wide-scale use of plastic as a nation and the beginning of Pittsburgh’s battle with the hard to breakdown substance.
Landscape (Macro Level)
Two World Wars:
The changes brought about by the wars were profound across the nation. It changed the way people treated their lives and changed Pittsburgh from an up and coming city to a wealth metropolis well off from supplying the wars also hugely shifted labor and the workforce. Most notably in WWll, we see the entry of women into the workplace, with Rosy the Riveter working in Pittsburgh own Westinghouse. Accompanying this time of saving and using what can be found, there is also the continued development of more and more efficient means or fast production along with better ways to ship goods over longer distances. While the war will not be over in this section of history, it is these two events that set the stage for the era of increased waste and garbage that contributes to and begins to look familiar to today’s problems.
The Depression, The New Deal, and Organized Labor
For the citizens of Pittsburgh, the era between wars was not an easy time, and the town was hit hard by the stock market crash and its impending effects. This had a huge effect on labor with many losing their jobs and fighting for work in manufacturing. However, this increase in labor made it easier for companies like Carnegie steel to give lower wages and provide worse treatment for their workers. To combat the poor conditions and the loss of jobs, the US created the National Industrial Recovery Act and New Deal in 1993, creating job workers’ rights. For waste in Pittsburgh, the most impactful aspect of these acts is the establishment of the middle class and a consumer that has more expendable income and free time than ever before in American’s history.
1941–1980
Niche (Micro Level)
Pittsburgh’s First Sewage Treatment Plant
Throughout most of the first half of the 20th century, Pittsburgh’s sewers ran directly into its rivers, polluting the waters with a rapidly growing population’s waste. However, in 1958 this was finally put to a stop with the opening of the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority Sewage Treatment plant. With the installment of the plant, for the first time, sewage was treated before being returned to the rivers. Despite spillages due to increased runoff that continue even today, this marked a significant improvement in the waste management of Pittsburgh and marked a shift from human bodily waste to their consumer waste being Pittsburgh’s biggest issue.
Waste that Will Not Leave: Styrofoam, First Plastic Snack Bag, Aluminium Cans, and PET Soda Bottles
Starting in the 1940’s we begin to see the trends of waste look more familiar to what we think of today. As the deaths and problems of sewage in Pittsburgh become at least partially solved, the problem of garbage takes its place. Influencing this tidal shift in waste production are the broader trends of consumerism and several other niche level events. Chief among these radical innovations to waste production was Dow Chemical’s invention of Styrofoam in 1941, the first plastic snack page in 1958, the aluminum soda can in 1964, and finally, in 1977, the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) soda bottle replacing glass bottles. The creation of these methods of food containment would begin to fill cities with a higher level of waste and unlike the organic waste of the past, these materials will not biodegrade for centuries to come.
Small Attempts to Clean Up and Reduce Waste
While in large, waste and consumptive acts that produced more of it were left unchecked during this era, there are two notable exceptions. The first was a book from 1960 by Vance Packard called The Waste Makers. The book proposed that the United States was consuming far more than it needed to and that this overconsumption was doing great harm. While these ideas would not take hold in Pittsburgh for decades, there were niche level movements to manage waste (although not reduce it). In 1970 Mayor Pete Flaherty made an appeal to the citizens to reduce their litter and to use the now numerous trash cans with the slogan, “For Pete’s Sake.”
Regime (Meso Level)
The Production Output of WWll is Used for Consumer Goods
After the war is over, America is left with a large industrial machine without a purpose. However, soon these mass-producing systems turned to meet the growing demands of consumers. In 1945 we saw an explosion of demand as a result of the lack of consumer goods during wartime. Allowing the many new products is the newly elevated plastics industry that came into its own in 1940 during the war. The post-war years also saw the expansion of packaging with the first PackExpo in 1956, proposing new and inventive ways to attract consumers through increasingly wasteful forms or packaging.
Urban Sprawl and Suburbia
Further exasperating waste and setting the stage for several future problems, the 1950s also saw the beginning of Suburban Sprawl. The term first used in The Times to describe the growing outskirts of cities, but what it represents for waste is an even faster consumption of goods to fill the larger spaces offered by suburbia and eventually create an entirely new form of waste from consumer shipping.
Recycling and Acts for Cleaner World
One the regime level, this era of history is filled with a powerful mechanism for producing waste. This is interesting because 1941–1945 recycling had become a precise and practiced part of most communities, and while recycling did not stop, it failed to keep pace with the new, more processed materials and the sheer scale of what was being produced. As a result, more and more garbage was shipped to, what at the time were, open landfills. There were many of them in Pennsylvania, making it cheap and easy for Pittsburgh to remedy its poor recycling by moving garbage elsewhere. Perhaps as a result of this, the 1970s saw several regime level changes aimed explicitly at America’s waste. Starting in 1970 with the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and followed by the passing of the Clean Water Act and Resource Recovery Act in 1972, Americans began to recognize the need for intervention in waste.
Landscape (Macro Level)
Consumerism
Of all the large scale contributors of waste in Pittsburgh, none have had the wide-scale effect of consumerism. Called the “Golden Age of Consumerism,” the 1950s and 1960s brought to life culture and norms of rigid structures that defined success as having many things and almost demanding wasteful attitudes towards consumption. Under this titanic force, the average American became someone with many things, and replacing the old with the new became the sign of success. The formation of this trend in this era can be linked to many niche and regime level events in previous years, from increased labor pay and competitive products using advertising and an economy that became dependent on constant purchasing of new goods.
Population Peak and Decrease Following The Collapse of Manufacturing
The population in Pittsburgh saw record growth throughout much of the first half of the 1900s, but it reached its peak in 1960. It is in the years following that many of the city’s most well-known industries, the forces that brought so many people to the city, began to fail. In 1970, just ten years after its peak, Pittsburgh saw the beginning of 40 years of depopulation. These influxes in the population in Pittsburgh at first produce vast amounts of unmanaged waste and eventually create a system of neglect and vacancy. Eventually, this will lead to new issues for waste in Pittsburgh even as the waste issues of the population bubble are still present.
The Shift From Food to Consumer Waste
Before the 1960s, the majority of waste produced by a person came from their food and ash. However, by the 1960s, household waste like paper and plastic, called municipal solid waste (MSW), had increased to 3 pounds per day. Fueled by the many innovations and the regimes that thrived on them, this landscape trend marked the beginning of consumer waste as a major contributor to the waste stream.
1981–2020
Niche (Micro Level)
Pittsburgh’s growing cost and efforts to reduce and reuse
While a serious problem before, the management of waste in Pittsburgh continues to be a considerable expense to the city. In 2012 the city spent 2 million dollars moving 95,000 tons of garbage to landfills in Pennsylvania. This niche sadly only echoes previous problems of displacing garbage to other regions rather than dealing with its reuse or reduction.
Amazon
Eventually taking the problem of consumer waste and packaging to new heights, 1994 saw the founding of Amazon. While created far from Pittsburgh, the effects of Amazon’s shipping to the suburbs and the city of Pittsburgh would only prove to increase the amount of waste the city produces daily. However, the most challenging problem this niche caused was a consumer who is normalized to receive packaging in their purchase and more distant from the cost of even more packaging for their purchase’s shipping.
Reducing and Reusing
There are many promising niches that have the potential to change the waste problems Pittsburgh has developed in the past century and which reflect the slowly changing mindset amongst consumers. Exploring reuse, there are Shredding Sundays at Protohaven, started in 2019 to create new products out of old plastics and much earlier Construction Junction, reusing building waste since 1999. Accompanying these initiatives of reuse are movements to reduce waste like Pittsburgh joined 100 Resilient Cities in 2017 and strikes by students in 2019 demanding that Pittsburgh make a pledge to fight Climate Change. Somewhere in these new and exciting innovations might be a niche that could make radical changes in the waste landscape.
Regime (Meso Level)
Agenda for Action
While the actions of the EPA previously were for safety and fixing problems caused by waste, the “Agenda for Action,” issued in 1989, marks a regime level shift. In the agenda, the EPA calls for more integrated management solutions for solid waste (the current solution is primarily landfills), with recycling and prevention of waste. While recycling was encouraged and carried out by the government previously, the EPA document marked the beginning of governments also looking at ways to prevent increased consumer waste.
Historic Vacancy
With the population still declining vacant lots reached their higher in 2005 with 10% of all Pittsburgh properties without a renter. Even today, there are over 27,000 in the city of Pittsburgh and 60,000 in the surrounding Allegheny county. For waste, this has meant historic levels of illegal dumping across the city. CleanWays, which collects garbage in the city, has picked up 5 million pounds of garbage at illegal dumping sites across the city. The trend not only makes additional cost on the cities waste removal, but it also makes it easy for people to avoid the correct way of disposing of waste and normalizes the behavior. This has the effect of making it harder for the city to accurately account for their waste production and displacing any goals the department might set.
NAFTA and the continued displacement of waste, china now no longer accepting
On the global stage, the creation of NAFTA in 1994 and WTO in 1995 opened up the world for more trade in goods and also garbage. While Pittsburgh has always relied on landfills and other means to distribute its garbage, these trade initiatives allowed the garbage to be moved even farther out of sight. This has allowed the city to ignore its growing waste problem for decades with a cheap and temporary solution. However, in 2019 this abruptly came to a stop when China, the primary receiver of Pittsburgh’s waste exports, refused to take any more. This backlash and new proximity to waste has left Pittsburgh scrambling for a solution to new ways to deal with their old problems of garbage.
Roadmap to Zero
Pittsburgh 2017 Roadmap to Zero presents an ambitious and aggressive attempt to reduce the city’s waste, standing counter to the city’s long habits of only looking to move the problem elsewhere. Within the initiative, there is a clear path for what needs to be done and many proposals of how the city might accomplish this goal by the fast-approaching year 2030. Whether or not this goal is met, the action shows a Pittsburgh that is growing and perhaps ready to solve its waste problem.
Landscape (Macro Level)
E-commerce facilitated consumerism
In the 1950’s Pittsburgh saw the beginning of consumerism and its appetite for packaging has been a significant contributor to the landscape of waste in the city ever since. In the most recent years of the city’s history this problem is now made even worse by e-commerce facilitating consumerism, producing packaging for the packaging of consumer goods. Because of how normalized this trend has become and because often the shipping cost if passed to the company, consumers are also entirely unaware of just how much this exact waste costs an already stretched system of waste management.
Climate Catastrophes and Climate Agreement
Climate change, while a problem for years before, is put into the forefront of the conversation after a hurricane devastated New Orleans, strengthened by the increased heat of climate change. For Pittsburgh, it is the ripples of this event that galvanizes the city into its more progressive changes and with ideas of zero waste and questions about the future of cities, Pittsburgh can engage in a conversation that did not exist years prior. The Paris Climate Change Act of 2016 further encourages these conversations and has the potential to shift the direction to much more long term and sustainable methods of dealing with waste.
Possible Areas and Concepts for Intervention
Current Practice Toward Reduction in Waste Generation
In Pittsburgh, current initiatives exist to reduce waste, increase recyclability, and inform the citizens in ways to contribute toward the goal of a zero-waste city within the next ten years. Pittsburgh is one of the 100 Resilient Cities. Pittsburgh recognized shocks and stresses the city’s landscape, among them, are aging infrastructure and failures, climate change and extreme temperatures, urban blight, and water insecurity. In 2017, the City of Pittsburgh announced its first Roadmap to Zero Waste by 2030, which outlines a pathway toward the goal of zero waste.
It is important to mention here that zero waste has varying meanings, depending on the stakeholder. The definition, according to the waste management industry, is the elimination of waste materials at the end of the useful life of something. Their focus is on increasing viable solutions for these materials that generate economic value.
Some of the proposed initiatives are: starting weekly pickup of recycling, providing blue bins for households, e-waste and hazardous waste programs, and adding more recycling containers in public spaces. Other goals include reducing the generation of waste through backyard composting and public education toward proper recycling.While the roadmap and goal is a move in the right direction toward zero-waste, Pittsburgh is moving slowly in comparison to other US cities of similar population. Further innovations are needed to intervene in the current scenarios to leverage existing structures, laws, and everyday behaviors.
ReuseFest
Pittsburgh participates in ReuseFest, a one-day drop off even. This is open to the public and has been effective in the diversion of materials from local landfills. Items collected are donated for reuse by local nonprofits, such as Construction Junction, Free Ride, and Goodwill. Such local events are friendly reminders for people to recycle their waste in the right way and give non-profits the platform to be seen. This annual event has the potential to scale by more frequent collection days. Slowly such an initiative should grow from a yearly event to the new normal.
Fridays for Futures
Fridays for futures is not a Pittsburgh specific initiative but rather a global one that has been picked up in Pittsburgh. Every Friday students and other supporters of the cause meet on the steps of the city council building in downtown Pittsburgh to protest for climate justice. The rise of these types of events shows that the public is now demanding change from higher officials.
412 Food Rescue
The goal of 412 Food Rescue is to eliminate edible food from entering the waste stream. Located in the heart of East Liberty, they connect surplus food from grocery stores with families and individuals in need. Through the help of a digital platform and local volunteers who provide the pick-up and delivery, 412 Food Rescue has been able to divert over 5.5 million pounds of food from 2015- 2019.
Regenerating Waste Stream Opportunities
Companies such as Integri Co. Composites Inc. processes landfill bound plastics into composite building materials that can be used in place of wood and concrete. This company upcycles low quality plastics into a higher valued product that is used in the built environment. While this organization is not located in Pittsburgh, the patented technology could be applied to local waste, in underutilized post-industrial spaces in Western Pennsylvania. Seeking opportunities to scale up plastic waste solutions is not addressing the root cause of the problem, but helping resolve some of the current waste stream already in circulation.
Proposing Future Leverage Points for Change
After completing the waste management historical multi-level perspective, and a review of some current initiatives toward waste reduction within Pittsburgh and other cities around the world, we applied the lens of Donella Meadows’ leverage points. We propose three leverage points that are important toward changes in the current system.
Leverage point 6: the structure of information flows
Meadows’ leverage point number 6 explains that “Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.” Our example of the power of access to information can be seen through John Snow’s mapping of the sources of contaminated water sources, during the Cholera epidemics in the 1800s.
Meadows also raises a relevant example of water sanitation. She explains, what if “every town or company that puts a water intake pipe in a river had to put it immediately downstream from its own outflow pipe”. Unquestionably this would be very effective because you force people to deal with their own filth and pollution. The idea here is to make the problem visible by adding additional information which is experienced by the people whose behavior you want to change. Another example of the power of information, Meadows mentions a set of identical houses. The only difference was that some of the houses had the electric meter installed in the basement, and the other had it installed in the front hall, in view of the tenants. They found that electrical consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was placed in the front hall and thus visible. The final example that Meadows mentions is the Toxic Release Inventory that in 1986 forced factories to report their pollutant release data publicly every year. Interestingly, there was no law against these pollutants or thresholds they had to adhere to however emissions dropped 40 percent by 1990. “One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent, just to get off that list”.
Flow of information
A proposed solution leveraging information could utilize existing platforms such as See Click Fix, a service app that helps residents to collect and communicate information to service officials. By making visible, to officials and conversely citizens, their data on service requests, in this case for waste and sanitation related, behavior shifts may be possible across multiple stakeholders, sanitation departments as well as citizens. This solution would only be visible to those within the app, therefore broader public facing information interventions also need to be invented.
Buses, Bus stops and other public gathering points, specific to Pittsburgh could serve as information dissemination opportunities. Information on current per capita waste outputs, or number of issues settled on See Click Fix would help to spread the information to a larger population. This information could show comparisons against the previous year's waste output tying cities initiatives cities within the 100 Resilient Cities project.
Leverage point 5: The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints)
Change the rules and you change the behavior. Meadows explains in leverage point number 5 that by restructuring the rules with rewards systems, incentives, and meaningful punitive enforcement, we can alter the behavior of the actors. In the context of business, adding responsibility in safe and easily recyclable packaging or extended producer responsibility over the products they produced and distribute could significantly reduce the generation of waste. Steering the behavior toward these new rules requires the appropriate incentives as well as enforcement. Meadow warns us that this high leverage requires recognition of the actors who have the power over these rules. The more distributed the power, to include all stakeholder, the better the outcome on a systemic level.
Setting rules in a system helps to set order for the perpetuation of the system.
Without a set of rules, a system can not function.” It is critical to include information flows in the setting of rules and laws. For example, Meadows expresses her outrage when world trade laws are set by corporations. These rules become the wrong rules serving only a few select stakeholders. In this case involving all stakeholders, including those without financial, and positional power, need to be included in the rule making process.
Currently, the rules on the state and local level of the waste management system is to divert waste from view and are not consistent with the rules of natural ecology. Meadows reminds us that having the wrong goals are detrimental to the system. Here we see this with conflicting rules between the current waste management system and the ecosystem.
Banning of Plastic
Yet to be implemented in Pittsburgh, there are approximately 400 cities around the world that have banned plastic grocery bags. In Kenya, the country has banned all single-use bags. The rule is enforced with law enforcement at airports as well as at border crossings. There is plenty of controversy around the effectiveness of the plastic bag ban and some experts suggest that a disposable plastic tax or some combination of the two rules may be more effective. Multiple rules and constraints may be necessary in order to break such an ingrained habit of the ubiquitous thin grocery bag. New laws that include incentives and punishment have been shown to change behavior, but can impact those who are vulnerable. For example, the fees for bags, which the polluter pays principle, allows people with a discretionary income to pay their way to landfill. Low income shoppers may not have the means to purchase cloth bags or to pay for additional taxes.
New innovations around new rule setting on single use plastic items need to be supported with alternative systems. This may include shopping bag return deposits for cloth bags, a rewards program that gives reusable bags to valued customers on their tenth store visit or take — give away bag system. Stores may also support continued cloth bag usage by taking back programs for repairing worn bags. The main idea is that the new rules of the system include alternate support systems to influence behavior change.
Rules on Sorting
A second intervention around rules can be borrowed by San Francisco’s “Fantastic Three” initiative. Unlike Pittsburgh’s single stream recycling program, San Francisco ratified laws based on the precautionary principle. These environmental laws range from procurement to resource conservation and clean transportation programming.
If Pittsburgh is not ready to move toward a fantastic three methods of sorting, perhaps incentives could be applied for an opt in program which would pilot in communities to allow residents incentives to compost. A compost rebate to each household based on diverted landfill costs and household output might be an area to focus on. Other cities have demonstrated that composting is possible. In NYC, a city of over 8 million people, they have composted over 3.2 million pounds of food scraps through drop off locations. In 2013, Mayor Bloomberg passed a local law allowing for voluntary curbside organics pick up. This program serves 3.5 million residents and has collected 50 thousand tons of organic scraps in 2018.
Multi-Scalar Interventions for Wicked Problems
Just as wicked problems have multi-scalar interconnected problems, so should the interventions which address them. The leverage points in the waste management system described above are a combination of an ecology of interventions. Interventions should be implemented in a scalar approach. If we treat waste as a utility, which means the more waste a customer produces, the more they would be taxed, using the polluter pays scheme, it might help make visible the amount of waste generated and help them feel the consequences of their waste generation by reflecting this in their monthly bills. This demonstrates the leverage point 5 of rules and taxes, with leverage point 6, flow of information. Including this at a higher tax within industry would be needed to avoid pay to pollute behavior. Public display of industrial waste could also play an important role in shifting the behavior of corporations.
Recap of experience, challenges, and insights
Our MLP mapping experience has definitely been an interesting one, starting offline when we still had the luxury of writing on physical post-its, to moving completely online after spring break due to COVID-19. Working online to map such a complex problem was difficult at first, especially discussions about where to place which post-it took longer through Zoom. It took some getting used to but once in the flow it became our new normal way of working.
We started by each taking responsibility for a 40 year period of history, researching the ins and outs of how waste was collected, how people thought about waste and putting all these insights onto post-its. After that initial round of research, we walked through all the post-its collectively and thought about connections we could draw, and which events were still missing. This method worked very well and allowed us to create a collective understanding of the problem space. Additionally, by drawing cause and effect lines early on we were able to research smaller in between events more specifically and give our Post-It’s more granular detail. One thing we had learned from our first assignment on wicked problems and stakeholder mapping was to improve our workflow. We did a better job this second time around managing our source material. The moment we put a post-it up, the corresponding reference was logged in our resources document. This was one example of an improvement made by working completely online; we set new rules which impacted the overall flow.
A challenge we faced regarding our MLP visual image was around making the connector lines legible. Drawing those lines it quickly became an illegible mess which took quite a lot of time to fix later on in the process. Finally, using Donella Meadows leverage points as a starting point to explore different types of interventions was extremely useful and brought this assignment to an organic close and a feeling of accomplishment. As a team, we look at these lessons learned and look forward to our next assignment of Causal Layered Analysis.
Link to Sources
