An initiative of New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station and Rutgers Cooperative Extension

Summit Report: Executive Summary

On February 21, 2001, the Solid Waste Policy Group at Rutgers the State University of New Jersey (SWPG) hosted a Solid Waste Summit, Producers and Consumers, Processors and Disposers: New Partners for a Sustainable Environment, the intent of which was to initiate discussion and planning for a leadership coalition for solid waste management and policy for the state. In New Jersey, as elsewhere, the solid waste community includes everyone; everyone generates waste. The Summit convened the most identifiable sectors of the community, including academics, government at various levels, legislators, the solid waste/recycling industry, the business/industrial community, the financial and legal communities, the agricultural community, and the environmental community.

The Summit was the product of several years of community building and other activities designed to put the resources at Rutgers and throughout the community into the service of real-world solid waste problems. Two existing practical policy projects—one involving diversion of food residuals and the other, diversion of computers, fluorescent light bulbs and mercury containing devices—have already demonstrated the value of leadership coalitions in focused solid waste areas.

Vision Of A Solid Waste Community Leadership Coalition

In part, it was the SWPG’s first two forays into creation of focused leadership coalitions which pointed to the need for a more comprehensive solid waste community leadership coalition for New Jersey. This coalition should be one through which its members can focus on long-term stewardship, allowing development of a range of scenarios and options, and allowing quick responses to unexpected changes in the solid waste scene. The proposed leadership coalition will need to be able to recognize the complexities of policy development in an ever-changing world. It would need to recognize, for example, that a corporation with international reach goes beyond any state boundaries, and that solving problems requires a change from older, top-down leadership models, to the pooling and coordinating of resources and capabilities of all members of the solid waste community.

Leadership in the solid waste area, as in other environmental policy areas, is dispersed throughout the entire solid waste community, but various of the stakeholders who hold some of the power are waiting for top-down leadership to tell them what to do. Top- down leadership can be slower and less efficient (e.g., the post flow-control situation, in which counties have been waiting for direction for several years) than leadership offered by a coalition. In a coalition, with members sharing responsibility and power, rapid decisions can be made and collective action taken. Collective decisions, resulting from inclusive leadership, are less subject to challenge than those imposed from above.

A leadership coalition can offer its members a chance to understand the true interests (not just the positions) of all parties, as well as the capabilities each party can contribute towards achieving joint objectives. A leadership coalition offers the opportunity to focus on interests which are fundamental and future-oriented, rather than just immediate interests. These interests may remain divergent among members of the solid waste community, but we need to recognize them.

A leadership coalition in New Jersey can serve as a model for the nation, in part because our population density and affluent, convenience oriented inhabitants make us the image of everyone else’s future.

Work at the February 21, 2001 Summit served as a beginning framework for building a comprehensive solid waste leadership coalition. Specifically, Summit participants established ground rules, identified key stakeholders and resources, and determined initial steps toward formalizing the coalition.

Summit Speakers

The keynote panelists were each chosen to represent various segments of the solid waste community, and they were charged with commenting on three matters: (a) past lessons, (b) current problems, and (c) future prospects, from the particular vantage point of that segment of the solid waste community that they represented:

The Keynote Responder, Alicia Culver, is a Senior Research Associate at INFORM, Inc. INFORM is a national non-profit environmental research organization, focusing on key program areas of chemical hazard prevention, solid waste reduction, and sustainable transportation.

The Keynote Panelists and Responder together offered us this vision of the future:

The quantity of our waste is increasing, and its toxicity is increasing as well. We must not saddle this state and its residents with a solid waste management plan that is simply a reaction to today’s perception of a solid waste crisis. Rather, we must design solutions that allow for our changing world of knowledge, technology and ideas. We have to work together to make the pieces fit, and to have each part understand the needs and goals of each other, and also overall needs and goals for the state. Collectively, we need a unified goal, objective, and vision of our current as well as future waste removal practices. An optimistic view would be to create a policy that will develop an integrated closed-end system of waste management which will minimize environmental and health hazards, and one that will maximize effectiveness and efficiency. More specifically, we must begin managing our resources and driving the management behaviors towards a mentality of sustainability versus waste management. Hopefully, this will take us from waste management through waste minimization to waste prevention.

Summit Breakout Groups

Breakout groups allowed participants to identify issues that would benefit from the collaborative work of a coalition, but the Summit itself was neither an attempt to mount a comprehensive identification of those issues nor to solve them. Rather, it was an attempt to model the development of a mechanism that will allow us to solve issues, in general.

Although the various breakout groups were allowed to focus on issues chosen by their participants, most came up with similar listings of obstacles expected, resources needed, and key steps to be taken and ways to measure success in those steps. Several groups asked for formation of a steering committee/core group whose tasks would be as follows:

The core group would also be charged with doing follow up and feedback to summit participants and other identified stakeholders.

There was consideration of how to keep a diverse constituency and the necessity to make the process exciting and valuable enough to maintain participant engagement. One group sought a mandate from the Governor on an issue it deemed pressing: "Identify the actual dollar amount of New Jersey’s solid waste debt and its fiscal impact on New Jersey, and find an equitable solution to paying this debt by identifying all available resources." Whether this is the central issue or not, the larger point was that we need a flagship issue, around which to marshal wide political and popular support. Having identified a flagship issue, we must also maintain sight of other pressing issues such as the debt, activity for which can benefit from and draw on the leadership coalition.

Some of the greatest diversity between breakout group results was in the identification of the stakeholders whose participation in a leadership coalition is essential. Presumably this was due to variation in the different issues chosen by the breakout groups. This was useful, because it caused the groups to stretch their thinking on stakeholders.

General Conclusions And Follow-up

General thoughts emerged from the Summit, and these were explored in a subsequent meeting of our nascent core group on 2 May 2001. Those thoughts and that meeting lead naturally to a plan of action for the next year, elaborated somewhat below:

There are fundamentally different interests that separate the various players in solid waste management. There are different interpretations of "where we are" and "the facts of the matter". There are also convergent interests that represent common ground. We need to identify clearly which is which, and we then need to:

We have a number of long-term issues that are going to require a long-term concerted effort by many players, issues such as "the debt", "over-decentralization", and "incompatible regulatory and business strategies". For a nascent group, it is premature to tackle anything so complex (from the outset), and a decision was made to concentrate on a series of achievable targets that are within our reach, among them:

Consideration of potential Solid Waste Targets engaged us in discussion of an issue to focus on for the coming year. We cannot do everything at once, so we decided to concentrate on Procurement, that is the process of choosing, contracting for, and acquiring goods and services. By controlling what comes into an entity, we hope to be able to reduce the waste stream and/or choose items which are recycled or otherwise curtail solid waste. A corollary will be to turn the waste from an entity into an expanded resource base. We should convene an action meeting in early June 2001, to plan and launch the campaign on Procurement. This choice has several advantages:

  1. It impacts on four major sectors of the economy (leisure, government, business, institutional), with (collectively) a huge market sector.

  2. We have innovative expertise to offer, from within our own group, and enough hard-earned experience to point the way to some real advances.

  3. There are other groups that are active in this arena (the Sustainable Business Alliance, the Office of Sustainability, the NJ Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability, the Sustainable Schools Alliance), and that allows us to expand our reach.

  4. The approach can be "operationalized" in straightforward fashion, and the results are measurable and relatively easy to quantify. A win becomes clear-cut and obvious.

We can amplify our impact by concentrating on organizations with large purchasing power leverage: hospitals, utilities, municipal, county, state and federal agencies, universities and colleges, school systems, and large firms of all kinds. We should target certain high-volume or expensive commodities, common to all, such as:

The Solid Waste Summit and follow up represent the first steps towards a comprehensive solid waste leadership coalition. People from various sectors are talking about their own issues, and the issues common to all sectors. Hopefully, work on our first common issue can inform and support solutions to more immediate and specific issues such as county solid waste debt.

Solid Waste Summit Report | Summit Report:  Text | Summit Report:  Breakout Group Summaries

Contact hayes@aesop.rutgers.edu with questions and comments.