Robin Nagle

From 1990 for about a decade i ran a Centre for Waste/Environmental Mngt. - my initial project worth $USM10 (in today's dollars) was to set up a pay-by-weight waste minimisation project for the City of Melbourne. More recently my little unit THE UNDERSTANDASCOPE conducted the following:

Litter as advertising – the subsidy we offer to fast food vendors.
An exhibition @ Yarra Festival, 2007
[Contribution for Yarra News, Vol.2, No.1]

Branded litter advertises its brand without costing the brand anything!

Litter-as-advertising simply hitches a ride on the back of the public space it fills, paying nothing for being noticed, paying nothing for the cost of cleaning it up, nothing for unblocking the drains it clogs nothing for the loss to recyclers when it bypasses them to arrive, mixed with rubbish, at landfill. And, since no-one wants to throw their picnic blanket over it, let alone play with the kids on top of it, litter devalues the public space it invades. It reduces the useful area of parks, makes them look tawdry, provides habitat for vermin and constitutes a health and safety risk (e.g. broken bottles) – all costs that are, ultimately, debited to our rates and taxes.

What’s to be done? Well, one can estimate many of these costs and calculate the subsidy the public purse provides to the advertisers whose brands appear on the litter. With this figure we can draw attention to the loss of amenity and to the fact that we’re actually subsidising that loss!

This information might help those who make all this packaging give those who drop it a real incentive to “dispose of it thoughtfully”!

The advent of the smart rubbish bin.

One way to do this would be to bar-code packaging and prompt people to return it to a collection machine at the company’s outlet. The machine would scan it and issue a product stamp (“burger stamp” say). Once 10 or so stamps had been issued, the collector could trade them for more product. The collected packaging could then be compressed and recycled. Packaging would at last have a clear and simple value to consumers. At present it has none, in fact its value is negative, people want to get rid of it – fast!

The new smart bins could even be jointly owned and serviced by a consortium of manufacturers of product, recyclers and governments. They could be placed at many well populated strategic places and the stamps they returned to consumers could be generic!

Together with the City of Yarra, The Understandascope, a Monash University research and demonstration centre, has done just this. In late autumn a week’s accumulated litter in a well trafficked park in Clifton Hill was collected, sorted, counted and measured. Hundreds of wrappers, bottles and of course … cigarette butts! [See picture in The Melbourne Times, 6.12.06, p.3, “Butt end of pollution”.]

The Understandascope was then focused onto this 30 m² carpet of litter. Using rates for local billboard-type advertising the advertising subsidy alone was estimated to be approximately $600. That’s $32’000 annually for this 2½ ha park. In addition to this are the thousands of dollars required by the City of Yarra for litter cleansing, for loss of amenity and for its various other costs already listed. Beyond the City of Yarra, Melbourne Water and Parks Victoria spend thousands more for water course cleansing, vermin control and all the infrastructures these require.

Are these subsidies warranted? Are they what we want our rates to be spent on? Come along, examine the details of the study and make up your own mind.

I LOOK FORWARD TO ANY CONTACT YOU CARE TO MAKE! YOURS FRANK FISHER
[PROFESSOR OF SUSTAINABILITY]

PS UNDER ANOTHER HAT I AM PUSHING TO PUT ON AN ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ONE OF OUR BIGGEST HOSPITALS TO INVESTIGATE WHY IT IS SO DIFFICULT TO GET MEDICAL PERSONNEL TO WASH THEIR HANDS BEFORE MAKING CONTACT WITH PATIENTS ... THIS IS THE ISSUE OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE!!