Waste disposal management is a conceptually simple yet challenging item
within the overall regulative pattern. It is a matter not only of common sense and
pragmatism, but also cleverness. The context is set by pollution and discard
output, particularly for urban dwellers. In those terms pollution and discard are
conscious and adjustable human actions. Control over these activities is also a co-
component of growth management strategy for both urban and rural develop-
ment with conservancy; especially so for rural areas and for water tracts in terms
of impact, because these open spaces are the ‘sink’ for pretty well all urban waste.
Urban sustainability, by even the most convoluted ascription, is an impossibility,
yet it remains a legitimate ambition. Certainly urban-with-rural conservation with
development is something to be striven for.
It is necessary to have a basic understanding of the distinction between the two
main disposal–dispersal activities and the various levels of assumed responsibil-
ity for waste-handling activities. A ‘point source’ (end-of-pipe) waste discard
activity amounts to a ‘point blame’ activity, which is discrete, identifiable and
actionable. A pipe emerging from a factory, which discharges into a water table,
is a ‘point source’ activity which can be cleaned up right there, so the emission
generator can be prosecuted, licensed, ameliorated, taxed or prohibited as is
appropriate to the circumstance.^38 Essentially this involves applying the polluter
pays principle for establishing the polluter as also the owner of
the problem: point-blame and point-clean-up at the point-source.
In the situation of ‘non-point-source’ pollution, consider the thou-
sands of automobiles emitting exhaust gases as ‘permitted releases’ from a met-
ropolitan automobile fleet, characterized by mobility multiplicity and intermittent
discharge. The otherwise logical ‘polluter pays principle’ hovers ineffectually over
these ‘fugitive emissions’ – examined earlier in a general way within the review
of Consumer Dynamics and Discard Dynamics (chapter 3).
All of agriculture and all of industry aggregates as a non-point waste disper-
sal problematic. The issue in these wider contexts is not only that non-point
sources are too numerous or cumbersome to itemize; it is also the difficulty of iso-
lating different categories of polluter in correct proportion and administering the
socially appropriate clean-up, taxing, alleviating and ameliorating, and prosecut-
ing procedures. Because points of ‘blame’ cannot be readily isolated and dealt
with, the punitive ‘sticks’ engaged to back up waste disposal management give
way to inducements to good behaviour, the rewarding ‘carrots’. People, the only
conscious polluters in nature, must be ‘potty trained’, taught good manners, and
enthused and educated to address waste disposal management in order to attain
their due rewards of personal satisfaction and community approval.
Judith Petts (1994) provides a progression for planning waste disposal man-
agement: involving project definition, impact study, decision-making and imple-
mentation. Operating within this procedural construct, the main policy principles
are paraphrased as follows:- Thefirstand societally most ‘clever’ principle of waste disposal management
is the avoidance of waste production in and of itself, in accordance with the maxim
that the most effective way to avert the sewage, garbage and gas emission
184 Practice
Recycler’s World:
http://www.recycle.net