Improving social technologies for recycling
EPSRC-funded project SUE-WASTE has undertaken a study of the recycling habits of two dense housing areas to investigate why these areas have particularly low recycling participation rates.
Although kerbside recycling participation rates have been well studied, little consideration has been paid to dense housing, especially high-rise estates, despite a generally poor recycling record in these areas. Dense housing estates often present infrastructural difficulties for recyclates storage and collections and as such a reduced service often results.
SUE-WASTE investigated two sites: an inner London estate and Portsmouth, one of the most densely populated cities in Europe. Both sites were found to have minimal storage space either within the home or in external private, communal or public areas. Both areas have high churn rates.
Analysis of the findings suggests that consideration needs to be given to several factors: architectural, technological, infrastructural and organisational. Spatial ownership needs to be clearly demarcated and maintained. Solutions must be tailored to existing exigencies of the built environment (such as poor vehicular access) and need to include broader infrastructural factors such as functioning lifts and convenient, safe storage facilities. Furthermore, social factors must also be considered. For example, communication strategies need to be simple and consistent and need to acknowledge non-Anglophone residents.
The researchers also found that although new build offers the possibility for more carefully thought through integrated waste collections, this is not always being realized because of conflicting pressure to increase housing density in urban areas.
For more information on the improvement of waste collection procedures and infrastructural design for high- and low-rise dense housing visit http://www.suewaste.soton.ac.uk/ or contact Dr Catherine Alexander c.alexander@gold.ac.uk
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Energy Footprint of Waste Management Methods
The SUE-WASTE consortium has produced an energy footprinting model to compare different waste recycling and disposal techniques with respect to their energy use.
EPSRC-funded project SUE-WASTE brought together a number of leading UK university groups to investigate problems of waste resource management in urban environments.
SUEWASTE researchers from the University of Southampton first sought to understand and quantify energy usage associated with the collection, separation, processing and disposal of household waste, using the city of Southampton itself as a case study.
The researchers then produced a model of the energy and materials balance in order to compare different waste disposal and recycling techniques with respect to their energy use.
The research team worked closely with the local authority and the Project Integra waste management group.
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Industrial and Social Ecology of Urban Resource Flows:
Local Area Resource Analysis (LARA)
EPSRC-funded project SUE-WASTE has designed a model that estimates household resource use and waste arisings in small geographical areas. Local Area Resource Analysis (LARA) is a top down model of material and energy flows in households. It uses expenditure data from the National Statistics and household data from the Census to model materials and energy consumption at a high level of socio-economic and geographical detail. LARA can be used to assess and forecast local waste arisings.
LARA can be combined with a waste input-output model to estimate the upstream commercial and industrial wastes attributable to households. The waste input-output model is based on national input-output statistics and can be used to identify the waste arisings along supply chains for a variety of commercial and industrial waste streams.
The principal objective of the Industrial and Social Ecology of Urban Resource Flows project was to strengthen the theoretical foundation for sustainable waste management by developing a conceptual framework for mapping resource flows through the urban environment and applying this to selected illustrative case studies. LARA and the waste input-output model form components of the Surrey Lifestyle Mapping framework, developed within SUE-WASTE and extended through the ESRC funded Research group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment (RESOLVE).
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