Lesley Stone, “Sustainablility is an ethical issue”

“People think that if it’s collected then it’s automatically recycled, this is not always the case. By co-mingling you create entropy, you can’t separate them out without contamination at some level.” Lesley Stone.

Palm Beach resident Lesley Stone MSc, PhD is the Environmental Coordinator at Auckland University. She has been in tertiary education for 16 years, and her PhD is in Environmental Science.

A founding trustee on the Waste Resource Trust, she is a member of the Waste Advisory Board to the government(although her views here are her own and are not representative of that board).

Here she touches on waste, sustainability and values.

“Waste always comes up in an urban context, it’s the flipside to our affluent society.

“How do we go from a lineal perspective, one of buying, using and throwing away to a circular perspective of reducing, re-using and recycling?

“It’s quite a big jump to see waste as a resource and take responsibility to separate it into different bins.

“The rule of thumb with recycling is to separate at source. That involves the least energy and effort and you get the highest quality. The more you co-mingle, the more energy you require at the other end. The higher the quality of sorting, the higher quality product at the other end.

“If you want to retain markets for your materials they have to be good quality. The on-sellers have always looked at markets and stockpiled a bit, it goes up and down like commodities.

“Number one and two plastics are relatively pure plastics. These can be recovered and turned back into basically the same product. The other numbers are complex plastics and what you end up with a degraded product.

“People think that if it’s collected then it’s automatically recycled, this is not always the case. By co-mingling you create entropy, you can’t separate them out without contamination at some level.

“Sustainability is an ethical issue. It’s about values; what do we care about? And caring is definitely the beginning of sustainability. As far as waste goes it’s about accepting responsibility and working out locally what we are going to do about it.

“On Waiheke we have a little not-for-profit company who take responsibility – not just for recycling but for employment as well. Why would you trash that? We want people to take responsibility.

“The mandate of the Waste Resource Trust, as I remember, is the profits from Clean Stream go to the trust who put the money back into education in the community to teach recycling and re-using. Junk To Funk, and working with schools, the community and businesses to raise awareness is all good stuff. You are never going to get that from a big multi-national corporate. Why would you get rid of that if you care about the community? By getting rid of that you are showing a lack of sensitivity to the community, it’s just sad.

“Another issue that a lot of the work, practice and research I’ve done is that the solutions we find for problems associated with the environment, have to relate to the local context. Because if they don’t resonate with the people involved the people won’t take on the change.

“People often want to take a solution that works in one place and put it on top of another. In my experience this never works. And that’s exactly what we are getting here with waste, water, and kerbing.

“Water is a great example here on Waiheke because it teaches our children that it is a precious resource. If the island were reticulated that knowledge would disappear. Again, why would you want to do that if you want people to be responsible?” •