Restoring order and control

Governance of rubbish & recycling

Since 2014, China’s leader, Xi Jinping has had a serious impact on the global linear economy. When he took office, the whole world knew of the out-of-control hazardous pollution and bad environmental situation. The failing linear-economy triggered him to adapt the circular- or blue-economy. This multifaceted principle is described in many publications by Prof. Gunter Pauli. All Chinese schoolchildren have to read his work.

It is for residents still often obscure what happens to waste. Many industrialised countries dumped polluted "recycling" in China for years under the disguise of free trade. Out of sight out of mind. With the changed leadership in China, a large part of its economy has since been converted from fossil fuel based ‘linear’ into local circular systems. In 2015, they purchased for instance more than 300 massive sorting / waste-to-energy factories. Controlled environments a mile in diameter, empowering local communities. After a significant on-notice period they banned the contaminated and toxic waste-import.

Since then Melbourne has experienced a few 'self-ignited' very toxic fires at ‘recycling/sorting’ and storage locations. SKM was labelled a rogue operator by Minister Lily d’Ambrosio. Community resistance was building and small chemical-storage and very large warehouses full of unwanted unsorted recyclables were fount. even after the constantly emerging stream TV-news-items on intercepted 40 foot containers full of polluted recycling junk at our less developed neighbouring countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Well-known local consumer brands repeatedly came up with their packaging logos on the TV news. With names and addresses on transport documents for these containers, sending them back in such a situation is fairly easy. 

Since the SKM collapsed last month the Australian general public has now experienced some serious out-of-control governance issues. Yellow-bin co-mingled recycling and red-bin rubbish all going to landfill. Over 300 containers full of rubbish were fount.

This messy situation has caused significant environmental- and public health issues that are yet hard to quantify in a financial way, but its time to restore order and control. We need to aim to eliminate land-filling. Build community owned modern engineered waste-sorting and controlled environment processing plants. One of the blue-economy principles is: there is no waste.

Various EU countries have for a long time banned landfilling and the export of rubbish. Some jumped on this, were very smart, innovated and are now leading the circular economy.

(Apartment) building fraud

My first experience with building fraud was from 1990 till 2002 in the Netherlands, where I lived then. One whistle-blower and a brave journalist surfaced the massive building-fraud on Dutch government’s building projects, involving 344 construction companies. In 2005 came a closure, with a final 70 million Euro fine, and structural changes the governance control returned.

The global flammable cladding disasters finally came to the media’s attention on 17/6/2017 when the 24 storey Grenfell-tower in London caught fire by a faulty refrigerator in the basement. This caused severe damage to the building and killed 72 people as it was covered in good-looking but highly flammable plating. These sad disasters have unfortunately happened in a range of other high-rise buildings around the world.

Melbourne has had two of these on both sides of Southern Cross train station, which triggered a statewide cladding audit. On 20/7/2019 the report showed the cladding scandal will result in the Victorian government meeting most of the cost of rectification works as it’s probably way too expensive for residents to fix these construction problems.

Thanks to an ABC 4-corners TV reportage, that aired yesterday 19/8/2019, a range of other high-rise building faults coming to the surface cracks/non compliance. I expect this won’t stop anytime soon as a few other elements haven't been included in this yet.

The financial stakes in the construction industry are very high. Controlled environments again and innovation with systems like ISO 9000 continuous improvement.

Can we take control back as consumers and rebuild trust? It's time for a culture-change.