While there’s no template for a successful waste management plan, most incorporate several of the same key components.
Effective waste management is all but impossible without a robust and detailed plan in place. Waste issues are incredibly complex, demanding an understanding of various waste streams, the cooperation and collaboration of numerous parties, and a constant awareness of both current and future waste management needs. That said, as waste generation continues to increase worldwide, effective waste management is only becoming more important.
While needs, capabilities, and technologies vary across municipalities — meaning there is no “standard” waste management plan — the vast majority of well-formed waste management plans share a fundamental goal: reducing the amount of waste that’s sent to landfills. At the highest level, a waste management strategy is a system for managing solid waste, and in today’s environment, managing solid waste is almost synonymous with reducing it.
However, despite waste management’s incompatibility with templatization, there are several key components that the majority of successful waste management plans incorporate. These include:
1. Flexibility
Successful waste management plans prioritize flexibility and agility, as a community’s waste management needs are always subject to change. Population, local resources, economics, environmental events, and consumer habits all factor into the type and volume of waste a community produces, and waste management authorities must be prepared to respond to shifts in any of these variables appropriately.
2. Support from Political Stakeholders
Waste management plans can be rolled out at the local, regional, or national level, but at any scale, it’s vital that the relevant political stakeholders have not only accepted the need for a plan, but agreed to allocate the requisite resources for its execution. Political stakeholders will often inquire about why a community needs a waste management plan, the plan’s scope and budget, who will be involved in the plan’s design and execution, and the plan’s relationship to other policies and goals, including:
- Spatial planning: Spatial and development planning regulations may limit where waste or disposal facilities can be located, and stakeholders must reconcile these restrictions with the imperative to put these facilities in places that maximize both quality of life and waste disposal convenience.
- Environmental planning: Waste management planning and environmental planning go hand-in-hand. Good waste management planning facilitates the achievement of a community’s environmental goals, which are often essential to minimizing the community’s production of waste — which, in turn, makes long-term waste management easier.
- Energy planning: Depending on the method employed, waste disposal may either use or create energy. In order to fuel waste disposal or appropriately use the fuel it creates, a community’s waste planning must be carefully aligned with its energy planning.
- Human health: It’s not uncommon for waste — even household waste — to contain chemical substances that are unhealthy for humans. This waste can be especially dangerous for those tasked with collecting and disposing of it. As such, depending on the factors at play in a particular community, certain aspects of a waste management plan should be jointly drafted by waste management and public health stakeholders.
3. Clear, Measurable Objectives
Evaluating the success of a waste management program requires understanding its starting point and having clear, measurable objectives in place. To achieve this, stakeholders must audit their existing waste management program, noting areas for improvement and taking quantitative measures of its status whenever possible. Most waste management objectives begin as descriptive or qualitative — “reduce waste” or “increase recycling” — but to measure a program’s progress, such statements should be turned into quantifiable metrics.
4. Ideas for Long-Term Development
Most waste management plans only cover the forthcoming three to five years, but maintaining a long-term perspective helps build on past, current, and future successes. Truly impactful waste management plans consider not only how to solve current problems, but how to prevent future ones by investing in new facilities or conducting innovative research that will better a community in the coming decades.
A Step-by-Step Approach
Balancing competing interests, numerous stakeholders, and evolving needs can make creating an effective waste management plan a significant challenge for all but the most organized, well-resourced communities. Fortunately, communities need not tackle this challenge all at once — nor need they tackle it alone.
While there is no “standard” waste management plan, by partnering with a strategic advisor like SEI to build some or all of the key components outlined above into its unique plan, a community will take an important first step in building a waste management infrastructure that will not only serve its needs now, but enable it to scale its operations as needed over the course of several years. Ultimately, the imperative of effective waste management is clear, but even a measured, step-by-step approach can make a significant difference in most communities across the country.
