Who is most responsible for waste?

This week I’ve been reading Myra Hird’s new book A Public Sociology of Waste. One of her main points is that the waste problem has been framed around household responsibility. In the public imagination it is households that produce waste. Fixing it is down to individuals to be careful about what they buy and recycle more.

That certainly seems to be a fairly common perception. If and when waste policy comes up in politics, it is almost always around domestic waste – such as Rishi Sunak’s imaginary bins. This isn’t very surprising, as it’s the most visible form of waste. We all have bins and collection days. Other forms of waste are more or less invisible to us, and so they get less attention.

This is a mistake, says Hird. It suits those who make the most mess to keep the focus on households and personal behaviour, because it keeps our eyes off the bigger issues.

To demonstrate, here is the breakdown of waste sources from the government’s statistics. (It’s from the latest update but has the 2018 figures, don’t ask me why.) C&I here is commercial and industrial. CD&E is construction, demolition and extraction.

Should households really be the focus when it comes to reducing waste and creating a circular economy? Like meeting climate targets, we can’t get there without households participating, but there are other players who could be a priority. Commercial and industrial is more significant than households, and both are dwarfed by the huge impact of construction, demolition and extraction.

These figures are for the UK, but the differences in responsibility are more stark elsewhere. The more dependent on mining and heavy industry an economy is, the bigger the mountain of invisible waste. Hird writes from Canada, and by her estimate household waste would be less than 1% of the overall problem.

I won’t go into detail about the various solutions here, though I’ve written before about construction waste and what could be done about it. What’s important is not stop with households. When governments make policy announcements about households, we need to keep asking them about the broader forms of waste.