Grégoire Meylan

Discourse coalitions in Swiss waste management: gridlock or winds of change?

As a complex socio-technical system, waste management is crucially important for the sustainable management of material and energy flows. Transition to better performing waste management systems requires not only determining what needs to be changed but also finding out how this change can be realized. Without understanding the political context, insights from decision support tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA) are likely to be lost in translation to decision and policy making. This study strives to provide a first insight into the political context and address the opportunities and barriers pertinent to initiating a change in Swiss waste management. For this purpose, the discourses around a major policy process are analysed to uncover the policy beliefs and preferences of actors. Discourse coalitions are delineated by referring to the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier, 1998) and using the Discourse Network Analysis (Leifeld and Haunss, 2012) method. The results display an incoherent regime (Fuenfschilling and Truffer, 2014) with divergent belief clusters on core issues in waste management. Yet, some actors holding different beliefs appear to have overlapping interests on secondary issues such as the treatment of biogenic waste or plastics. Although the current political context hinders a system-wide disruptive change, transitions can be initiated at local or regional scale by utilizing the shared interest across different discourse coalitions.

Linking energy scenarios and waste storylines for prospective environmental assessment of waste management systems

Multiple international and supranational organizations call upon changes in current waste management practices to play a key role in developing more sustainable economies. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a popular method used to assess the sustainability of future waste management options. The uncertainties about future energy systems and waste compositions, however, may lead to ambiguous LCA results. One way to deal with this challenge is the development of joint energy and waste scenarios to investigate the robustness of waste management options. To date, joint energy and waste scenarios rely on the integration of large economic and engineering models. Complex models can hamper the transparency required for decision-makers to understand and implement LCA recommendations. Here we present the alternative of combining diverse energy scenarios and stakeholder-based waste storylines. This is a more qualitative approach than previous sustainable energy/waste evaluations and has a double aim: to address upfront the energy and waste composition sensitivity and enhance transparency by both relying on well-documented energy scenarios and involving stakeholders in the waste storyline formulation. We apply the approach to the Swiss municipal solid waste (MSW) management system in the context of the energy transition away from nuclear power. Three energy scenarios capture how radical the transition might be, while the storylines reflect societal developments and waste policies leading to low, high, and average MSW amounts. The approach delivers feasibility spaces of energy systems and waste compositions as input to the LCAs. It ensures a high level of transparency, which, in conjunction with the participation of decision-makers, has the potential to increase the chances of implementation of the recommendations based on LCA results.

Solid waste management of small island developing states—the case of the Seychelles: a systemic and collaborative study of Swiss and Seychellois students to support policy

Solid waste management (SWM) is a significant challenge for the Seychelles. Waste generation, fueled by economic development and tourism, increases steadily, while landfilling continues to be the main disposal path, thus exacerbating the island nation’s specific weaknesses. Due to the small scale of the Seychelles economy, there is little capital available to stimulate innovations in SWM and generate the knowledge for setting priorities and guiding SWM action. Students from ETH Zurich and UniSey conducted a transdisciplinary case study (tdCS) to fill this knowledge gap and gain insights into the obstacles and opportunities related to sustainable SWM. The tdCS approach allowed students to gain comprehensive and in-depth knowledge about the SWM system required to set priorities for action and next steps. The government should streamline the different financial frameworks according to a clear principle (e.g., polluter pays principle). Specific biogenic waste streams represent a potential source of energy and fertilizers. Expanding the scope and densifying the network of collection points could help raise recycling rates of other waste fractions. Diverting biogenic waste and recycling more glass, metals, paper, and plastics would also significantly reduce landfilling rates. Regardless of future amounts of waste ending up on landfills, the latter must be reengineered before the surrounding environment suffers major adverse impacts. All these actions imply a government-driven approach which integrates the views of stakeholders and consumers alike.