By Kay Martin

Few public policies have spawned more dramatic changes in industry practices, public sentiment, and environmental initiatives than the "integrated waste management hierarchy." Shortly after its introduction by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1989, the hierarchy escalated recycling to a national populist movement, launching whole new infrastructures, industries, and government bureaucracies. State and local programs based on the hierarchy enjoyed unparalleled successes in the 1990s and quickly formed the cornerstone of current waste management systems.

In recent years, however, the once-steady progress of landfill diversion efforts has stalled. National recycling rates are leveling off at around 30%, while waste generation continues to rise. Some argue that aggressive new prescriptive measures must be taken to preserve the hierarchy and head off a retrenchment to disposal-based systems. Others suggest that a fresh approach to resource conservation and materials efficiency might be needed to address current challenges and catalyze the development of a more sustainable industrial economy.

A dispassionate exchange of ideas on these issues is long overdue. Current discussions accentuate the positive, but they typically have left little room for critical debates on the hierarchy's inherent limitations or how future environmental platforms can modify and improve upon what is already in place. This is an effort to begin this dialogue and explore the broader question of where we might go from here.

Legacy of the Hierarchy

State recycling laws modeled on the integrated waste management hierarchy spearheaded major gains in resource recovery and reuse. A thorough chronicle of the past decade, however, also reveals a darker side. Industry changes spurred by the hierarchy cut a jagged path - one equally marked by chaos and unintended consequences. When taking the full measure of progress to date, and when refining and shaping future policy, this less tidy portrait - this underbelly of market forces, serendipity, and raw politics - must also be noted and reconciled.

Market Disruptions

One of the first unanticipated consequences of the hierarchy was a severe disruption of existing scrap markets. Large-scale recovery of recyclable commodities from the wastestream quickly saturated secondary-materials markets in the early '90s, contributing to price failures, displacement of independent recyclers, and consolidations within the scrap industry. Waste-recovery technologies have continued to outstrip the ability of manufacturers to efficiently absorb the volume of secondary materials entering the marketplace. This constitutes a pervasive and chronic constraint on the growth and sustainability of traditional recycling efforts.

Industry Consolidation and Privatization

A second unanticipated consequence of the hierarchy was the rapid conversion of the solid-waste stream into a commodity stream and a fundamental reshuffling of industry stakeholders. Recyclables separation and recovery added an entirely new layer to the waste-handling infrastructure, placing some players in the strategic position of shopping market destinations for segregated commodities and mixed residuals. Fortified by the Carbone decision, waste became an article of commerce whose flow was influenced more by economics than by simple geography. The local solid waste planning template was suddenly out the window. An era of intense competition among service providers began, with waste flowing freely across jurisdictional boundaries, leaving some big winners and big losers in its wake.

Struggles for control of the wastestream and associated services pitted public against private and set off a chain reaction of litigation, divestitures, acquisitions, and consolidations. Changing market forces, when coupled with the increased costs of new regulatory requirements, militated against small local service providers, a good share of which were public agencies. In the new solid waste economy, large service corporations, with their greater access to capital, interjurisdictional and interstate markets, and political influence, enjoyed a decided competitive advantage. In this important sense, EPA's hierarchy and Subtitle D combined to inadvertently foster privatization and consolidation of the solid waste industry.

Disposal Enhancements

A third unintended consequence of the hierarchy was, ironically, the creation of relatively abundant and inexpensive state-of-the-art disposal capacity. The grim specter of vanishing landfill space never materialized, save in some limited, albeit highly visible, metropolitan markets. Disposal crises did occur, but not in the manner envisioned by EPA. As the volume of wastes flowing to local landfills and incinerators began to ebb through recycling or export to more distant facilities, some operators were faced with the crisis of excess capacity, declining revenue streams, and unmet debt service. Conversely, the greater throughput and efficiencies of large regional landfills, along with increased market competition among them, combined to drive disposal pricing downward, in many cases below that of preferred upstream diversion options.

As we proceed into the 21^st century, the dust has settled on a new infrastructure, rhetoric, and way of doing business. But those in the waste management trenches have keen memories of industry upheavals and restructuring, fortunes won and lost, and the pervasive fickleness of the marketplace. Today's front-line recyclers still struggle with market saturation and marginal or negative returns. For them, the legacy of uncertainty continues. Behind the hierarchy's best public face lurks the caveat emptor that recycling-as-we-know-it is not infinitely expandable. Continuing progress might require new environmental strategies that could not have been anticipated more than a decade ago.

The Case for Change

All public policy initiatives face two significant and related challenges: keeping pace with a highly dynamic environment and overcoming the inertia of their own success. Time and circumstance have placed an increasing burden on the hierarchy as an effective guideline for environmental action. While still relevant in general principle, socioeconomic changes, as well as significant advances in science and technology, have not been incorporated. Major concepts embodied in the hierarchy that deserve a fresh look include the following:

Resource Optimization

One of the basic tenets of current environmental policy is that Earth's resources are finite and being depleted at an increasing rate. Managing spent resources in accordance with the hierarchy, it's reasoned, will slow or reverse this trend since recycling and reuse result in an overall reduction in the amount of materials needed to manufacture a given set of products over time.

At first glance, the logic of this approach is compelling. With recycling as a primary vehicle for "dematerialization," the resource-depletion challenge can be met by systematically segregating and recovering spent materials, returning them to the marketplace, and then encouraging or requiring industry to reuse them.

The basic formula endorsed by the hierarchy for optimizing scarce resources is single-pathway substitution of recycled materials for virgin. At its extreme, this approach calls for a legislated "reverse distribution system," wherein products flow back to manufacturers after consumer use. The assumption is that such policies will force product-makers to design for recycling by selecting materials that can be readily reused in subsequent products.

But the solution, it now appears, is not that simple. Traditional recycling has been effectively limited as a dematerialization strategy by the dynamic balance of environmental and economic costs that accompany reclamation and reuse. Recovered materials, like their virgin and fossil counterparts, have costs associated with their acquisition and delivery to industry and their subsequent reprocessing into new products. These vary greatly by material type, recovery kinetics, supply, residual value, and domino effects on other resources required by the remanufacturing cycle.

For instance, source-separated white office paper has been a consistent performer in secondary markets, and its reuse in the manufacture of new paper products is often flagged as a prime example of materials efficiency. In contrast, recovery of low-grade, contaminated, or undersized paper fractions from the mixed wastestream requires increasing energy and labor expenditures that result, at some point, in diminishing economic and environmental returns. Put another way, the cost-benefit ratio or recyclability of secondary materials is not linear but subject to limitations imposed by the fluctuating nature of prevailing technologies and markets.

The hierarchy ignores not only the variable efficiencies impacting recovery and remanufacturing but also the dynamic nature of resource relationships. True resource optimization over time might involve complex multiple-pathway substitutions of one material for another or the potential displacement of both virgin and recycled by entirely new raw materials, synthetics, or composites (e.g., substituting plastics for glass or creating new plant-based chemical platforms for fuels, polymers, and other everyday products).

A central challenge is how to objectively assess the complex life cycle trade-offs involved in choices between virgin and recycled versions of the same material or in substituting one material type or product for another. Policy frameworks that seek to create artificial barriers or interventions in the marketplace that favor one raw material over another narrow the range of potential solutions and can often discourage the very innovation that leads to greater efficiencies.

In summary, while Earth's resource inventory is arguably limited, it is not static. Future replenishment of industrial feedstocks will require continued enhancement of recovery and reuse but will also rely heavily on the development of new raw materials. Some resources referred to as "virgin" are in fact renewable and could provide the key to future prosperity and sustainability. Biomass, for example, has the potential to supply all of the basic energy and chemical needs of 21^st century industry. In the final analysis, resources may be finite or renewable, but the raw materials and products generated from them are theoretically infinite, limited only by the ingenuity and opportunities for innovation provided by the free marketplace.

Prescriptive Technologies

If relationships among resources are dynamic, it would follow that greatest efficiencies in materials use can be realized through flexible management strategies that both facilitate and respond to changes in technologies and markets. The hierarchy, however, fails to provide this kind of enabling policy platform. Instead it establishes a static model that ranks a narrow range of designated technologies, and then it artificially restricts the flow of discarded materials to these favored handling options and product markets. In the extreme, codification of the hierarchy has, in some states, been wedded with mandatory landfill diversion quotas that give statutory preference to recycling and composting technologies while specifically limiting or excluding credit for other handling options.

While the hierarchy has served to jump-start resource recovery over the last decade, it provides no remedies for the recent plateauing of recycling and reuse efforts beyond a ramping up of existing practices. Limiting factors discussed above suggest that simply expanding the supply of increasingly marginal secondary materials and then mandating industry to use them fails to ensure incremental gains in resource efficiency. In fact, it is unlikely that source reduction, recycling, and composting alone can make the new inroads necessary to return the lion's share of waste materials to beneficial use. Additional tools are needed, but the narrow scope and inherent conservatism of the hierarchy compromise the ability of existing policy to either spearhead or accommodate innovative solutions.

Circling the wagons around the hierarchy has become a common theme of the environmental movement. The burden of this conservatism is nowhere more apparent than in recent debates surrounding new upstream and downstream waste-handling options. Alternative technologies at or near commercialization, such as anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, gasification, and hydrolysis, hold tremendous potential for converting residual wastestream materials into valuable commodities. These and other innovative technologies are laying the foundation for new industries that could complement traditional recycling and help make giant strides toward both disposal and pollution abatement.

Rather than being heralded as additional weapons for the war on waste, however, technologies lying outside the traditional hierarchy have engendered both suspicion and overt opposition. Objectors have characterized them as, at best, an interim solution to "immature" commodity and compost markets and, at worst, a Trojan horse for the resurrection of end-of-pipe solutions. Hierarchy boosters have also taken a strong stand against initiatives perceived to improve landfill efficiencies and economics, including new bioreactor technologies that significantly reduce landfill greenhouse gas emissions.

Ingenuity and invention are the harbingers of more sustainable industrial systems. Revisions or reformulations of the hierarchy to accommodate technological change are urgently needed. The principal downside to prescriptive systems is that they nurture specific and limited infrastructures, economic interests, and political constituencies. When static policy frameworks become vested, innovation is cast as the interloper. Forces of change are perceived not as potential vehicles for progress but as threats to that which is valuable and good.

Good Markets, Bad Markets

The hierarchy's penchant for ranking technologies has had important spillover effects on the progress and scope of secondary-materials markets. At least two factors have contributed to the current ceilings on resource recovery and reuse. First and perhaps foremost is the hierarchy's historic reliance on supply-side economics. Chronic shortfalls in market demand for recovered materials were not anticipated and, in hindsight, have handicapped both the tempo and sustainability of recycling industry growth.

A second critical factor is the narrow market boundaries drawn by the hierarchy. The "highest and best use" of discarded materials is assumed to derive from their separation into homogeneous streams for recycling or composting. Moreover, greatest value has been placed on pure-stream or parallel product recycling (e.g., paper to paper, plastics to plastics) and on the mulching or decomposition of organics into soil amendments. Traditional scrap markets, however, were saturated early on and have continued to be outpaced by recovery efforts over the past decade. Similarly, compost markets remain weak and have failed to mature as profitable growth industries.

New policy platforms for product stewardship are attracting considerable interest and might have utility for a variety of durable goods. At its extreme, the stewardship concept envisions a reverse product distribution system as the antidote to sluggish or failed secondary-materials markets. But for anyone who has stood at the working face of a landfill, the prospect of assigning ownership and responsibility for the full range and volume of materials discarded each day is neither realistic nor feasible. Reclaiming value from marginal fractions of the mixed wastestream is a central unmet challenge that requires the development of new entry points to the marketplace.

An alternative to mandating secondary-materials use by industry is to look beyond the hierarchy's current market boundaries to innovative processes and products. Since the bulk of waste headed for disposal consists of biomass, technologies capable of converting these materials into renewable sources of power, fuel, and chemicals hold considerable promise. New bioindustries that can utilize waste cellulose feedstocks could provide unprecedented access to broad market sectors currently dominated by petroleum and petrochemicals. The potential exists to convert biomass wastes into such diverse products as transportation fuels, plastics, fabrics, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, cosmetics, fragrances, pharmaceuticals, and adhesives. These developments would not only dramatically reduce the amount of waste going to disposal, but they would also help advance key national policy objectives for pollution abatement, resource conservation, energy independence, and national security.

But the prospect of channeling discarded materials into new bioenergy and bioproducts markets is not without its detractors. Conservative voices have argued that end uses, as well as technologies, should be ranked according to their relative standing in the hierarchy. In other words, discards must first be reserved for traditional secondary-materials and soil amendment markets, and only failing that should they be converted to other products. By this yardstick, waste paper must always be directed to recycled-paper or wallboard markets before being made available for conversion to bioplastics, the composting of yardwaste must always take precedence over its conversion to degradable solvents, waste plastics must be made into planters and park benches before being converted to low-sulphur diesel fuel, and so on.

The underlying rationale is that the hierarchy represents a reliable index of environmental benefit and therefore is an appropriate guide for the ranking of potential market end uses. Since new bioindustries or other conversion technologies have no place in the hierarchy, classification of product markets associated with these processes must be deemed less desirable by virtue of their omission, or some objective criteria must be advanced and consistently applied to guide marketing decisions. As in the case of technology rankings, however, such efforts have borne little fruit.

A popular benchmark offered up by hierarchy supporters is that end-market optimization equates to the number of times discarded materials can be reused. For example, running recovered paper through the recycling chain (for which an estimated seven trips is theoretically possible, from high to low grades) is typically cited as a prime example of "highest and best use." This product market option is then typically contrasted with the use of waste paper or other cellulose for, say, ethanol production in which the feedstock is "used up" after a single cycle. The observer is then invited to do the math. But, as it turns out, the equation is more complex.

When the broader life cycle effects of alternative end uses are considered, placing the relative mix of costs and benefits on a common scale becomes exceedingly difficult. Just as moving paper through successive links in the recycling chain saves trees, it also consumes water, energy, and other resources and produces effluent and emissions. In contrast, converting waste paper to biofuels displaces petroleum-based equivalents and offsets associated environmental toxins. One market recycles paper, the other recycles carbon dioxide. One market displaces renewables, the other fossil resources. Which is environmentally superior? This question is particularly relevant for emerging biopolymer and biochemical markets, where diverse new materials and compounds produced from biomass might be theoretically reused an infinite number of times through recycling at the molecular level.

Obviously many other end uses supported by the hierarchy, such as plastic lumber or soil amendments, are single-cycle markets. Similarly, end uses sometimes grouped with and sanctioned as "composting" might, in reality, not meet the environmental muster of biorefinery products made from comparable feedstocks. In California, for example, only about 20% of the yard debris diverted from landfills statewide actually flows to compost and mulch markets. Instead, nearly half of these materials ends up at the landfill anyway in the form of a single-use product, alternative daily cover.

While there is arguably little science in attempts to rank end uses, there is also a disproportionate apprehension among hierarchy advocates that new types of markets for recovered materials will somehow undermine the future of recycling. The concern is that new capital-intensive industries might sequester recyclable portions of the wastestream by securing flow agreements with municipalities or by benefiting unfairly from government subsidies, such as renewable-energy tax credits or producer payments.

Frequently overlooked in such discussions is that the germinal industries in question can utilize wastestream fractions that are currently going to disposal and have little or no market value. By collocating their operations with MRFs or by developing regional standalone facilities, new industries can intercept segregated feedstocks that fit their specifications at a zero to negative cost. As such, their principal competition will be landfills, not recycling operations. Because recyclable commodities can access alternative industrial feedstock markets that offer an economic return, they will continue to be cherry-picked and managed by collectors and processors in ways that best enhance the bottom line of existing operations.

In summary, the hierarchy as presently drafted narrowly construes the range of acceptable markets to which recovered materials can or should be directed. By expanding and diversifying the spectrum of processes and products that can return discards to beneficial use, recycling markets will be both complemented and enhanced. For perhaps the first time, new industries are developing outside the waste management arena that could create a significant demand-pull in the marketplace for secondary materials. This opportunity should not be squandered by vested interests or minority political agendas. When it comes to valorizing the 165-plus million tons of solid waste disposed annually in America, there is no such thing as a "bad" market. All markets are good markets because all ultimately reduce dependence on virgin or fossil resources and help restore environmental balance.

Cost Matters

A final issue that deserves further discussion is economic sustainability. A common and frequently covert undercurrent of environmental initiatives is a patent distrust of the free market system to enable or advance conservation goals. This perception seems to rest on two premises. One is that the price of goods and services fails to accurately reflect their hidden negative costs, or "externalities." Market participants therefore are perceived as having incomplete or inaccurate information on which to base decisions on the allocation of scarce resources. The second is that producers and consumers are driven principally by unbridled self-interest - one by the profit motive and the other by overconsumption.

Since these economic mainsprings are seen as antithetical to environmental objectives, it's felt that government must intervene in the marketplace to both shape and limit the range of choices available to participants. Thus, the tendency to downplay or ignore cost factors in the evaluation of environmental program alternatives springs, in part, from efforts to override values in the marketplace that are believed to negatively influence producer and consumer decisions at the expense of conservation efforts. Prescriptive environmental platforms, such as the integrated waste management hierarchy, are regulatory attempts at market intervention.

One of the unstated purposes of prioritizing waste processing technologies and end markets is to keep economic performance data off the table and out of the policy arena. The hierarchy, in effect, seeks to discount or set aside market factors perceived to unfairly benefit waste disposal and virgin materials options. This intervention is accomplished by the direct promotion and subsidization of recycling and composting operations and by complementary efforts to insulate the resultant infrastructure from external competition. The underlying rationale is that designated environmental goals are absolute and of sufficient urgency to be pursued at any price.

Historically, inquiries into the actual costs of recycling programs have received a somewhat chilly reception. If recycling is expensive, for some reason, so is resource wasting and environmental damage. Recent events, however, have exposed these programs to fiscal scrutiny uncharacteristic of earlier years. Chronic underperformance in secondary-materials markets has increasingly placed recycling advocates in the difficult position of defending escalating program costs and subsidies in the face of diminishing municipal budgets. At the same time, new and potentially profitable waste technologies neither contemplated nor advocated by the hierarchy are emerging as viable alternatives to existing operations.

Conversion technologies, for example, are opening up new and potentially significant energy, fuel, and chemical markets for discarded materials. Hierarchy purists, however, view such developments with suspicion, despite their often strong environmental credentials. The fear is that these new value-added products could capture increased market share at the expense of recycling and composting operations. Concern has also been expressed that innovative technologies and industries that readily utilize major portions of the solid-waste stream could discourage current source reduction efforts. Unless such alternatives are subordinated to the hierarchy now, it's argued, economic factors could be given undue weight in future policy and help promulgate a system based largely on "convenience and consumerism."

The notion that economic feasibility or cost considerations should be excluded from deliberations on future resource management policy, however, is difficult to support. Enhancing the effectiveness of recovery and reuse and allocating resources more efficiently require a clear understanding of where the biggest bang for the conservation and reindustrialization buck resides. In the grand scheme of things, cost does matter. If future strategies for resource use are to be truly sustainable, they must also pencil out.

By rejecting market prices outright as unreliable, the hierarchy turns a blind eye to the very cost-benefit analyses on which informed public policy and program decisions rely. The hierarchy, in fact, lacks any mechanism for calibrating strategic alternatives based on the complex interplay of dollar investments and overall environmental benefit. While negative externalities certainly exist in the marketplace, these distortions not only can but must be integrated into resource decisions. This can be accomplished in two ways.

First, where the production and consumption of goods or services involves effects, such as pollution, which are not directly accounted for in the economic transactions of market participants, such external costs can be incorporated into the pricing structure. If directly measurable, internalization of these costs may take the form of creating property rights, responsibilities, and liabilities for market transactions involving environmental effects. Such external costs may be legitimately assessed at any point in the life cycle of commodity transactions, from producer, to distributor, to retailer, to consumer, to recycler, to disposer. Where there is no intrinsic dollar value associated with environmental effects, as in emissions impacts on an air basin, alternative valuation methods might be employed to approximate the external "cost" to society. These rule-setting methods, such as emissions credit trading, and the "shadow prices" they create serve as proxies for actual environmental costs.

A second method for balancing the effects of hidden external costs in environmental decision-making is to clearly separate the economic (market pricing) and environmental (life cycle) attributes of proposed actions, such that they vary independently. This allows for the creation of a level playing field in which the costs and benefits of various resource, technology, and product alternatives might be objectively weighed. This path, however, requires a new type of environmental platform - one that is performance-based rather than prescriptive and one that harbors no sacred cows.

Elements of a New Environmental Platform

Historically, environmental platforms have been hierarchical by nature. Since their mission is to pursue and preserve balance in natural systems, they typically weave theory and practice into a ranked set of strategic priorities. Future policy might be expected to champion these same conservation goals but substantially broaden the context and pathways for their achievement. The next generation of environmental policies might take a distinctively nonlinear, performance-based approach. Such policy frameworks will recognize the dynamic nature of global resources, foster innovative technologies and markets, and lay the necessary economic foundation for sustainable systems.

Redefining X and Y, Adding Z

The existing waste management hierarchy is essentially a two-dimensional paradigm that places waste-handling technology categories on the X axis and then ranks them along the Y axis according to their presumed level of environmental benefit (Figure 1). As already noted, this model is both prescriptive and static in that it addresses and prioritizes only a limited number of technologies. It also places little emphasis on science, relying instead on generalized notions of environmental performance while ignoring the range of variability within and between ranked categories.

In contrast, an environmental platform that both accommodates and spurs innovation must be flexible and science-based. Such a model is necessarily resource- and technology-neutral and would assign strategic priorities based on measurable life cycle attributes. Overall societal benefits in this scenario would be measured against the so-called "triple bottom line" - the sustainable balance among environmental protection, economic growth, and social responsibility. The new platform would thus approximate a three-dimensional paradigm with the following axes:

Environment (X Axis). The first axis measures relative environmental benefit as a function of objective indices, such as resource conservation, pollution abatement, and energy balance. As noted earlier, improvements in resource use can be measured in relation to dematerialization, recovery and reuse, the shift to renewables, development of new or synthetic materials, or even preservation of biodiversity. Pollution abatement can be assessed by the reduction of toxic releases to the air, water, land, and food chain, as well as the reduction of toxic content in industrial and consumer products. Similarly, processes and products can be rated according to their ratio of energy inputs and outputs. The bottom line for waste managers is that it's not just about garbage and recycling anymore. Future measures of environmental benefit must necessarily take place within a multidisciplinary or cross-media context.

Comprehensive life cycle analyses are highlighting the tremendous variability in environmental costs and benefits found across the range of industrial inputs, processes, and outputs. They are also demonstrating the complexity of arriving at reliable and comparable measures of resource efficiency. While life cycle assessments are still largely reliant on summary or industry-standard data, they provide the beginnings of a scientific scale on which the environmental attributes of a broad spectrum of resources, technologies, and products can be objectively weighed.

Economy (Y Axis). The second dimension of the new environmental platform is relative cost. All resources, processes, and products have economic referents that impact their efficiency and success in the marketplace. Put simply, it's all about optimizing regulatory and industry investments. At any period in time there is, theoretically, a finite amount of public and private capital available for investment in efforts to enhance resource and productive efficiency. This capital may take the form of dollars or intellectual property. The return on such investments can be calculated as the ratio between total costs and measurable progress toward an intended goal, such as disposal tonnage reduction or an increase in life cycle benefits. The locus and efficacy of investments must be evaluated in terms of transaction costs (what it took to implement the action) as well as opportunity costs (what differential benefits could have been derived from an alternative course of action).

Few studies have systematically compiled and evaluated the transaction and opportunity costs of current environmental policies. For example, several states have accomplished comparable recycling rates with very different approaches and investments of public funds. Some have relied upon financial incentives to local jurisdictions and businesses, while others have imposed stringent mandates and punitive measures. Some have minimized or decentralized program administration, while others have created huge bureaucracies and regulatory frameworks for the enforcement of recycling laws. To the extent that transaction costs are unnecessarily high in relation to performance, the return on investment suffers from lost opportunities to sow limited capital in more fertile ground.

A better understanding is also needed regarding the impact of alternative public policy initiatives on the nature and direction of private investment in environmental technologies. Some regulatory hardliners advocate a two-pronged approach for influencing the flow of private capital: (1) impose pollution penalties, prescribed mitigation pathways, and reverse distribution systems on industry and (2) redirect existing subsidies or other financial incentives to recycling and selected "resource conscious" enterprises. This strategy seeks to subordinate market forces by prescriptive and largely punitive rule-making frameworks intended to pick winners and losers in the new industrial economy.

While maintenance of environmental standards by industry is necessary, the channeling of private capital into prescriptive regulatory measures often discourages the development of innovative and environmentally superior solutions nurtured by performance-based systems. Similarly, financial incentives, such as tax credits, research and development grants, or producer payments, can be effective vehicles for jump-starting environmentally beneficial industries. However, recycling, composting, or conversion technologies that rely on perpetual subsidization are poor building blocks for a sustainable economy. The success of new industries must ultimately rest in their ability to create value and thereby effectively displace competing and less sustainable products on the basis of both price and performance.

The essential message of industrial ecology is not philosophical but economic. Reducing toxicity and waste equates to reducing costs, and profit is a key driver of innovation and change. Successful reindustrialization is predicated on the wedding of environmental benefit with return on investment and the utilization of accurate pricing signals to spur more responsible market decisions.

Society (Z Axis). The third axis of the new environmental platform assesses the social and political viability of policy alternatives and actions. Relative viability is a measure of the receptivity or resistance of target sectors to desired changes in market behavior and the degree to which intended outcomes are accomplished or assimilated.

An idea, an industry, a product, or a price tag that fails to garner public support is a nonstarter. Public policy initiatives that seek to create a more sustainable society must tap into the hearts and minds of producers and consumers in ways that affect their daily market decisions. Compatibility with core sociocultural values, or the ability to influence a strategic shift in value priorities, is a critical and often-overlooked element in successful environmental policy.

Integrated waste management initiatives based on the current hierarchy have been effective in rallying general public support for pollution prevention and the recycling ethic. But this support is both situational and tenuous. Public enthusiasm for waste reduction and recycling, for example, can wane rapidly in the face of escalating program costs or the local siting of a recycling facility that offends the nose or prevailing sense of social justice. Similarly, the willingness of market participants to consistently choose recycled over virgin or reusables over disposables is influenced by a host of competing values, such as aesthetics, convenience, price, and performance.

Such prescriptive environmental platforms as the hierarchy embody parochial notions about the appropriate juxtaposition of society and nature. The policies they advocate and the values they promote are often assumed to be so elemental as to be absolute or ordained and therefore deserving of preeminence in society at large. But in the daily decisions of producers and consumers, the environmental ethic is but one component of a larger and constantly changing inventory of societal values that define overall quality of life.

The challenge is how to bring environmental values into the mix in a way that both recognizes and accommodates a diversity of needs and interests. Generally speaking, the greatest success is associated with changes that are seamless, or that are easily integrated without compromising a broader spectrum of behaviors. Performance-based environmental platforms have several advantages in this regard.

For example, there are many ways to approach the reduction of fossil-fuel use and toxic releases associated with private automobiles. A rule-driven strategy might be to pursue mandatory electric-car production quotas, sport utility vehicle bans, and an increase in gasoline pump prices to $5/gal. Such prescriptive measures would likely face strong public resistance, not because consumers oppose air-quality improvements but because the proposed methods for achieving these goals conflict with vested social values, such as individual mobility and family- or recreational-vehicle use. An alternative strategy would be to impose flexible, open-ended performance standards on automakers. This type of environmental policy encourages the development of more seamless solutions, such as the introduction of new hybrid, clean-diesel, and fuel-cell vehicles that achieve greater fuel efficiencies and reduced emissions while at the same time meeting the quality-of-life needs of consumers.

Recycling the Hierarchy

The environmental, economic, and social axes of this new platform interact to create an index of relative benefit that can be utilized as a decision-making framework. In this model, individual technologies or products represent data points within a dynamic three-dimensional paradigm. The ongoing interplay among the environment (X axis), economy (Y axis), and society (Z axis) defines their relative "sustainability" at given points in time and space (see Figure 2).

For purposes of comparison with the existing hierarchy, the model in Figure 2 depicts general categories of technologies, as well as individual operations or programs. It assumes, for simplicity, that the greatest social value is assigned to recycling and the least value to disposal, with new conversion processes somewhere in between (Z axis). It also assumes that sustainability is optimized by alternatives that achieve greatest life cycle benefits at the lowest cost and the highest level of social acceptance.

Notably, in Figure 2 specific operations within the three technology categories (1-11) are assigned differential values to illustrate their potentially broad and overlapping ranges of cost-benefit relationships (X and Y axes). For example, a low-cost environmentally marginal open dump (1) might have more in common with a similarly priced compost operation that creates offsite leachate and odor problems (8) than it does with a Subtitle D sanitary landfill (3). Similarly, a biorefinery (7) or a bioreactor landfill cell with energy recovery (4) might match or exceed the environmental performance of simple windrow composting operations (9), although with somewhat higher capital and operating costs.

Many other examples could be represented. As Figure 2 illustrates, however, this new model's essential point of departure from the hierarchy is that it allows priorities to be assigned to processes, operations, industries, and products based on their specific performance. Moreover, it more accurately depicts the complex interplay of factors that determine overall societal benefit and is sensitive to both local conditions and changes over time. Consequently, the technology categories relied upon by the hierarchy become largely irrelevant, and the long-awaited level playing field begins to emerge.

The Power of Nonlinear Thinking

Noted iconoclast H.L. Mencken once wrote: "Every complex problem has a solution that is simple, direct, plausible, and wrong." Waste prevention and the more efficient utilization of resources is one of those complex problems that defy linear thinking.

Applying prescriptive formulas to global challenges is analogous to using a digital or serial processor to create artificial intelligence. The solutions generated by such linear processors are highly consistent but wholly dependent on extrinsic sets of rules. Any emergent properties not already programmed are simply not recognized. In contrast, parallel processors or network devices generate their own rules as they go along based on their recognition of values and patterns in nonlinear inputs. All living systems, including ecosystems, rely on the latter type of noisy landscape for the recombinant "intelligence" necessary for successful adaptation and change.

The same lesson applies here. The integrated waste management hierarchy was originally conceived as a set of guiding principles, not cardinal rules. Conservation goals are most effectively advanced by a dynamic policy framework that shuns absolutism and instead fosters the evolution of emergent ideas - innovative ways of conceptualizing resources, technologies, and products. This new environmental platform will take us beyond the integration of waste management practices to the integration of bodies of science, the integration of costs with the consequences of market decisions, and ultimately the integration of environmental values with overall quality of life.

Kay Martin is director of solid waste management for the County of Ventura, CA, and a member of MSW Management's Editorial Advisory Board.

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MSW - September/October 2003