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Metrics / Measurement | ||
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Burgess COMMENTARY I am an advocate for radical accountability, part of a comprehensive system to improve the effectiveness of accountancy so that we do a better job of measuring and reporting what is important ... specifically not just money and profit but also social and environmental impacts. Within this framework, there is the concept of accounting for material flow in the most simple of ways ... weight and / or volume ... and some very broad classifications. This material flow accounting should be a part of the accounting for ALL the actors in the socio-enviro-economic system from the beginning of the supply chain to the final user / consumer. I also argue for the idea that measurement needs to be well designed in order for it to be useful for management and moving the needle. Specifically what this means is that deriving totals for a national economy is only the very first step. What are the numbers for an individual household, and specifically my household relative to a standard for comparison. What are the numbers for an individual restaurant, and a specific restaurant. Same for different factories in different industries in different companies and places. Radical accountability requires specific measurement and linking the measurement with a specific place and process and organization. Lastly ... there needs to be an easily accessible repository for all of this so that the media, law enforcement and others may use the data in a useful way. Peter Burgess | ||
Two Steps Forward ... A tale of two circles
 — consisting of ) Indeed, MSW, which includes newspapers, cardboard, yard clippings, bottles and cans and various other things people toss out, represents less than 2 percent of the bigger picture — what I dubbed Gross National Trash, or GNT. You can see it in the graphic below. The entire circle on the left represents a mere sliver of the circle on the right. GNT includes the daily detritus of our industrial world — the emissions, effluents, dregs and debris created by business.  Now, the data sets have been updated again. And, once again, the numbers are similar — and similarly suspect. The implications of so many unknowns when it comes to waste represent a conundrum for the emerging circular economy: If we can’t accurately measure our waste, how can we manage it? To understand the problem, it helps to understand the bigger picture. The GNT pie includes five major slices:
Dr. Liboiron had been chasing a similar story — she cites the earliest data from 1987, not 1992 — which showed that MSW comprised just 3 percent of GNT (my term, not hers), more than I'd calculated but relatively the same small slice. She called the 3 percent number 'shady,' in part because much of the waste was self-reported by industry. 'Almost all of this waste is interred onsite without permit or public knowledge on the industrial property where it was generated,' Liboiron noted. Being the good academic, she cites — and also debunks — other research studies that came up with roughly the same 97-to-3 GNT-MSW ratio. In the end, Dr. Liboiron seemed as perplexed as I was more than two decades ago: 'In short, we do not have an idea of the quantity of non-household solid waste produced in North America. When we do have ideas of (sub)quantities, we do not have good classifications, so we do not know what we are quantifying. The 97-3 ratio might be okay to use as an illustrative point of relative scale, but since modern waste is characterized by extreme tonnage, toxicity and heterogeneity, then we have no reliable data on any of the three things that characterize most waste produced in North America.'Why does all this matter? It’s not just academic. As we increasingly explore, design and implement business strategies that can lead to circular systems of commerce, it will be ever more important to understand where we are. That means we’ll need solid baselines from which to set ambitious goals and to measure progress. We’ll need a better accounting of the wastes produced at every stage of mining, harvesting, manufacturing, customer use and whatever we eventually rename 'end of life,' since that concept theoretically will disappear in a circular world. Without good metrics, we’ll be unable to set policies or assess corporate commitments and achievements. We’ll risk being unable to adequately address resource use efficiency at the scale needed to produce the goods demanded by the billion individuals soon to be knocking on the door of the middle class. We’ll claim progress without any reasonable understanding of whether we’re actually making any. That could lead to the circular economy becoming just another meaningless buzzword, if not greenwash. And that would truly be a waste. Topics: share this article Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Joel Makower avatar Joel Makower Chairman & Executive Editor GreenBiz Group @makower
Joel Makower
| Tuesday, April 9, 2019 - 2:11am The text being discussed is available at | https://www.greenbiz.com/article/tale-two-circles-0 and |