WASTE MANAGEMENT OR SOIL MANAGEMENT

Gerry Gillespie President, Canberra and South East Region Environment Centre

Introduction

The past five years have seen remarkable changes in the Waste Management industry to the point where it is becoming common practice to refer to the development of new waste management programs as 'resource management' strategies.

Indeed unless programs contain a strong element of resource recovery they are now considered immature and ill conceived.

This was highlighted in our own region when the ACT Government became the first local authority in the world to release a strategy with the title "No Waste by 2010" - at the time the target was considered foolish and politically naive in waste industry circles. Since that time the ACT has reached a point where it now recycles around 60% of its waste stream and in the process has created 200 new employment positions in the Canberra community.

Many other local government authorities around the world have now followed the Canberra communities' brave move.

In New Zealand, the Tindall Foundation established the Zero Waste New Zealand Trust the year after Canberra's document was released. Stimulating interest in the use of wastes as resources, the Trust now has around 30 councils registered on its books as Local authorities with a Zero Waste focus.

There are various Zero Waste organisations in the United States, which are pushing to establish a national Zero Waste program. The impact that these groups are having is reflected in State of California which has recently decided to adopt a focus of Zero Waste as its ultimate goal in waste management. In the UK the once Roman City of Bath has also adopted a Zero Waste Strategy.

This rapid shift in thinking reflects an awareness of the frightening impact we, as a species, are having on our environment.

Our industrial processes have brought us to a point where in excess of 90% of our production efforts return only waste. Of the goods manufactured and grown in this process, around 80% of it is buried in landfill within 6 months of production.

However, around 60% of all the materials we put into landfill is organic and a very large part of this has come from our own national farming processes. It is this degradation of our farmland which is the single greatest threat to sustainability.

Farming is a mineral extractive industry, which progressively removes from the soil not only the organic fraction, but also minerals and trace elements. All of this material is exported from the farm and carried into the cities where it is processed through people and after passing through a waste management system, ends up in either our landfill or our sewage treatment works.

Plants cannot make minerals and trace elements and these important structures in healthy plant growth are not put into our soils through the application of fertiliser.

The process of degradation of our soils costs us millions of dollars per year as a nation. At the same time one of the factors in this degradation, chemical fertiliser is constantly rising in cost, both to the farmer and to the broader community.

Australia's national fertiliser bill at the farm gate every year is in excess of $4 billion.

Over the past ten years government has attempted to address some of the soil and water issues through a variety of voluntary organisations such as Landcare and while the work of Landcare has been enormous in its scope and brilliant in its execution, at every turn they are soundly defeated by the size of the problem and the vastness of the country and a shortage of funds for the size of the job.

Currently much of this work relies for funding directly from Government budgets or on the sale of public utilities such as Telstra. As a funding effort it provides large quantities of resources, but on a National basis it barely touches the sides.

As the problems become larger, one is tempted to ask what National asset can we sell next to increase the funding?

Landcare as an entity needs ongoing funds, which provide it with an ongoing income. An income, which will be there for the duration of the problem, but will not compromise its voluntary nature.

It needs an income, which comes from the provision of a service. An income, which is business, based. A business, which can last forever.

That business is waste management. Or to be more precise, waste reduction. The focus of this new business would be the diversion of waste from landfill to farming.

Landfill in all its forms has become one of the largest long-term problems facing urban society today. It steals our space, devalues our property, threatens our waterways and contaminates the future. It is the graveyard of sustainability and it compromises the very survival of future generations.

At the same time, the other end of the process, farming, depletes our soil, pollutes our waterways, and increases our foreign debt.

Depletion of soil quality is a problem which hits the headlines in newspapers around the world every day. A science report in Britain last year stated that in excess of 30% of farm soils in the UK were deficient in organic material. Another report to the World Wildlife Fund stated that three quarters of Southern European agricultural soils have 2% or less organic carbon.

Yet the greatest contaminant in landfill is organic material. It is the moisture from organic material, which leaches through the landfill to create further problems of contamination and pollution.

If this organic material could be returned to the food chain through farmland application, we could eliminate forever the problems of landfill, create local employment programs, go some way to relieving the destruction of our soils through the overuse of chemical fertiliser, grow higher quality produce and save money at the same time!

There is a constant cry from compost makers that there is no market for products. At the same time our soils cry out for the application of the organic materials, micronutrients and microbial activity, which is compacted into our landfills every day.

We need a national program which is focussed on the removal of organic materials from the waste stream and the processing of this material into a viable, safe, balanced organic product for use on farms.

There is not a farmer in this world who wishes to leave their children acres of desolation and destruction. But the farmer is given no choice.

The farmer is the keeper of the nations soil. It is the farmer's activities, which will determine the long-term sustainability of our agricultural base.

It should not be expected that a farmer who business is open to flood, famine, fire and drought should be driven to using methods which, while keeping up production, destroy the soil. Yet they seem to have no choice, nobody else will pay the farmers mortgage while he changes to more 'organic' practices.

Who will provide the financial breathing space to allow for the luxury of change? Who can provide the farmer with a viable, productive alternative to the constant use of chemical fertiliser responsible for the degradation of our soils and the reduction in food value of the crops produced on them? How can we support the fertiliser companies in their distribution of this new range of products?

Protein levels are falling in produce from many farming areas. Even the seemingly indestructible deep rich soils of the Queensland Darling Downs are producing crops with falling protein levels.

Everything we do, everything we export, relies on the quality of our soil and its ability to produce. In the state of New South Wales, 70% of the land is affected by at least one form of land degradation; almost 30% is severely to very severely affected.

In the massive watercourse that constitutes the Murray-Darling River basin we are losing up to $700 million worth of agricultural land every year to degradation in its various forms.

The juggernaut of global trade has forgotten that it cannot exist without the soil.

It is the soils of other lands, which feed and clothe the workforce, which makes the goods for export. Indeed in many cases it is the soils themselves, which grow the goods for export.

The nation of Japan relies on 12 million hectares of land, outside its own landmass to maintain its inputs for production. Six million hectares of this land are in Australia, which, unless some profound change takes place, will not be able to maintain is current level of exports in several generations.

The same is true for all nations. It is the soil, which fills the nations belly and enables it to work.

Adding up the 'true' costs

In most urban societies around the world, the cost of landfill is skyrocketing. Yet landfill fees only cover a small part of the cost of landfill. The true costs of landfill when all burial, amenity, administration, security, replacement and on-costs are included are in most cases at least three times the cost charged at the gate.

Even in small unattended country landfills, when all costs are included the price per tonne is often around $50 to $70 per tonne.

If you add to these costs the value of organic materials lost from the farm to the landfill, the cost is immeasurable.

If these funds were redirected this money could be used for the processing of our organic materials into a quality compost suitable or even designed for specific farm use. In most instances the cost of this process could be less than the current cost of landfill.

It would have the additional added benefits of reducing the fertiliser bill for local farmers, increasing the organic levels in the soil, raising the microbial density of the soil and at the same time, the ability to produce quality products.

Recent work of the NSW South East Waste Board in the development of their Regional Plan indicated a need to clearly evaluate the full cost of disposal to landfill so as to identify for councillors and their communities, the actual financial outlay involved in disposing of any one tonne of material into landfill, and the potential opportunities that may arise by applying that financial outlay to the waste stream in a different way.

In the Shire of Young it was identified that the 'true cost' of disposal of waste to landfill was $77 per tonne, more than three times the rate of disposal currently charged at the tip gate.

If it were possible to maintain the site, assets and contract for say, $27 per tonne is it possible to produce a composted product and transport it a given distance for around $50 per tonne? This product could then be 'given' to the local farmer for a 'donation' of around $5 or $10 per cubic metre, which would go back to Landcare.

Once organic material is removed and used in this way, all other products in our waste streams become available for reuse. The 1% of hazardous waste in any stream of material could be removed before it becomes part of the waste stream and the remaining inert wastes and packaging used in local industrial processes or when sufficient material becomes available, transported off to National markets.

Other changes in the packaging industry could bring even larger benefits to the Landcare/ Waste Management alliance.

As the humble brown paper bag taught us many years ago, packaging does not need to be complex in its makeup to be effective and indeed even when it is complex it does not need to be antisocial.

It can be designed to be recycled to paper or recycled to compost depending on its clean or contaminated state. This combined with the major corporate commitments to the development of safe biodegradable plastics, will see us growing increasing quantities of our compostable or recyclable packaging within the coming years.

As was seen in the Sydney Olympics, it is possible to make safe, functional packaging out of materials, which can be cleanly composted back to a soil-enhancing product.

A product, which is then capable of going back to the agriculture, which, in turn, is growing the materials to make more packaging.

Japanese manufacturers and the German compost organisation ORBIT have overseen compost trials using these products, which have produced quality results.

We now have the opportunity to make previously wasteful packaging into the vehicle for change. Every piece of future packaging will become a carbon input into the composting process.

The last year has seen massive corporate commitments and investment in biomaterials. Materials, which can be readily composted or bio-recycled following their use in the community.

Eastman, BASF, Mitsubishi, Cargill Dow, Toyota, ADM and Dupont have all recognised the need to change and other companies such as Ford, 3M, Daimler Chrysler, Proctor & Gamble, Fujitsu, NTT and Sony have either made or expanded their commitment to the adoption and use of biodegradable plastics in their product lines.

This type of product, having carried its packaged contents to a rural centre can then be composted for the benefit of the local community - to create local jobs, to regenerate local soils and to grow local crops - all the while supporting Landcare and its local projects.

Conclusion

Numerous drivers determine our view of the future, but one above all is that upon which the term 'sustainable' is founded. That driver is the future of our children and likewise the generations, which may follow them.

All generations, all humanity, all biodiversity relies on the thin skin of the earth, which is the soil. We have clearly demonstrated that if we do not return to the soil the things, which we borrow from it the soil, it will degrade and die.

There is a profitable nexus between waste management and soil management. An alternative to landfill in Landcare. The nexus is that the solution to both problems has a common source. - The soil.

The removal process of waste management is a service with a cost, which will always remain. It is how we treat these goods once they are collected that will determine our future.

We can have pollution; acidification, contamination and waste or we can turn our efforts and expenditure toward employment, good food, clear air, healthy soil, clean water and community health.

The cost will be about the same initially and in the long run, most likely cheaper.

The benefits of such positive change - immeasurable.

Acknowledgments

ACT No Waste, Department of Urban Services, Canberra South East Landcare Resource NSW World Wildlife Fund UK Zero Waste International

References

"No Waste by 2010" - A Waste Management Strategy for Canberra - Dec 96 Proposed Regional Strategy - Resource NSW - June 2002 A Waste of Energy - World Wildlife Fund - Feb 2001 NSW State of the Environment Report 2000 - Land Backgrounder