Professor Ian Spellerberg
1 September 2004
Guy Salmon, the long-serving campaigner for the environment, recently floated the idea that New Zealanders re-think their approach to environmental policy and trying being a bit more Nordic.
It’s an interesting notion – one that might make many people rather defensive – to suggest that we are in some way less capable of environment stewardship than the Swedes, Fins and Norwegians.
Speaking at the annual State of the Nation’s Environment address, Salmon probed at our relative success in implementing environmental policy. Few would disagree that the Nordic nations are consistently more successful in achieving their environmental policy objectives. New Zealand’s performance has been patchy at best.
Salmon hit on one of the issues in environmental policy that is frequently overlooked– concerning the need for clear targets and milestones we need to reach along the way. The Nordic countries set high level goals, with cross-party agreement, and hand over the implementation of a environmental policy to an independent board comprising some the countries most trusted individuals. They set the targets and milestones and implement the necessary policy initiatives.
It is not the aim of this column to advocate for one system over another – simply to stress that there are myriad approaches to policy development and implementation. Ours might be the best. Or then again it might not be. Surely we would do well to look above the minutiae of discretionary hearing timeframes and permitted activity lists, and consider the alternatives.
The State of the Nation also highlighted the importance of setting bold national targets. Sweden and Norway have these, but by and large New Zealand does not.
I was reminded of the role of targets not only by Guy Salmon’s address, but also by the practical experience of working through a waste minimisation project for tertiary education providers in Canterbury. All the of the Big Four providers – Lincoln University, University of Canterbury, the College of Education and the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology – are working on waste minimisation together.
It’s an enormous task for the education sector, with a student population constantly on the move. And what becomes clear immediately is that so much of the effort that goes into a waste minimisation programme is providing “end of pipeline” solutions.
It makes you wonder what the Swedes and Danes would do. I would hazard a guess that they would spend little time on collecting, separating and sorting the torrent of wasted materials that comes out of a university or polytechnic. If you’re constantly dealing with the outflow, it becomes too hard to reach the next waste reduction target. I suspect the Scandinavians would focus on designing waste out of the system, by requiring goods to be designed for reuse, disassembly, or for total recovery using Design-for-Environment (DFE) principles.
This would inevitably require some form of regulatory response. In the Nordic countries, which all have strong market-led economies, it’s likely that a mandate against wasteful designing would be supported – because of its direct connection with the country’s high-level environmental goals. One can only wonder how this idea would be received by the business sector in New Zealand.
Waste minimisation in New Zealand is full of economic complexities and behavioural issues and the fear for companies and organisations is that, without clear targets and milestones, their efforts could be a waste of time. Companies will benefit from an immediate reduction in waste disposal costs, and fulfil a moral obligation to divert wasted resources from a hole in the ground. But how can they be effective in the long term when there is such a heavy dependence on voluntary compliance and the exercising of individual choices? Why shouldn’t there be some assistance in the form of design standards? All it would take is a directive from Government that the business sector must provide products that deliver safety, functionality, environmental sustainability and aesthetics – and in that order of priority. In other words, nothing should be designed, manufactured and sold until such standards have been reached.
If that could be achieved, we might also see a major shift in the way products are promoted and the type of attitudes to waste that commonly prevail. We need to look no further than prime-time television to see how wasting and wastefulness has become institutionalised in our lifestyles – there are endless home improvement programmes, for example, that hurl tonnes of materials into an ever-present skip, as they race against time to get the job done. What sort of this message does this send? Presumably that it’s okay to buy new materials, scrap the old ones and hide anything we don’t want in a very large pit for our grandchildren to deal with in the fullness of time.
Environmental responsibility depends on so many drivers – from product design, to responsible consumption, effective targets and the setting of behavioural norms through the content of programmes beamed into our homes.
Canterbury’s tertiary institutions are demonstrating their natural inclination towards what environmental policy people and Nordic folk refer to “long-termism” – thinking about how our activities today will impact on people in the future - and swinging into action together to scale the waste mountain.
One can only hope that other sectors will start thinking differently too, and set their sights considerably higher than the soft waste targets and non targets in our current national policy framework.
Professor Ian Spellerberg is Chair of the Lincoln University Environmental Task Force.