At Unwaste.io, we take data very seriously. Why? Because we believe that data has a big role to play in the practical adoption of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation.
EPR: a model built on data sharing
The companies that produce and sell plastic continue to insist that the plastic waste problem is mainly down to consumers and poor government.
“Plastic is a lightweight, safe, and energy-efficient material…The unfortunate scenes of plastic waste washing up in oceans around the world are a direct result of improperly managed plastic waste in many areas, and if we want to make a difference, this is where the focus should be.” A spokesman for the British Plastics Federation, to BBC News
Thankfully, this sort of fudging is becoming less acceptable and less available to plastic producers, thanks to the efforts of campaigns like Break Free from Plastic and The Story of Stuff. This video gives you a good idea of the full lifecycle of plastic and all the actors who should play a part in where plastic ends up.
The Story of Plastic (animated short) from the Story of Stuff project
To summarise the video:
“Plastic has a whole lifecycle that’s hidden from view, one that harms people and the planet from start to finish.”
International Regulations (COP26) now recognise the environmental impacts of fossil fuels when used for power generation and transportation. However, not everyone is aware that plastic production is a large and growing industry which also uses fossil fuels. In particular, the use of plastic for single-use packaging of consumer products. As this fantastic article by Rebecca Altman in The Atlantic sets out, the plastic industry is driven by supply, not demand. Our monitoring platform, Wastebase DATA, is focused on a particular type of single-use packaging — plastic bottles.
Given that most consumer markets in the global north are mature and highly competitive, low income countries in the global south are now key target markets for sales expansion by plastic bottle producers. Unfortunately the traditional solid waste management systems in these countries are often under-equipped, under-resourced and over-stretched - therefore unable to cope with the collection and appropriate treatment of this plastic.
EPR schemes, when properly implemented, allow all plastic bottle producers (whether they be national firms like Trade Kings or multinational firms like Coca-Cola) to innovate and compete on a level playing field - to ensure that the full environmental cost of collecting and treating the plastic items they produce, is reflected in the selling price to the consumer. An additional benefit is that, when purchasing the product, consumers will be able to compare that full price to other products which use different packaging materials, or even to non-packaged alternatives such as a cup of tea.
In the global north, there are many initiatives (such as this drinking fountain campaign by #OneLess) to promote a public supply of safe, drinkable water in urban areas. In the global south, it can be very difficult for individuals outside of their home, to find a supply which they can trust — bottled drinking water is not a luxury but a basic need.
EPR schemes require a genuine and transparent process of collaboration and open sharing among key stakeholders throughout the entire value chain of waste management in any specific country. These stakeholders include national government, local authorities, business and producers, waste management companies, trade unions, the informal sector, and NGOs.
So where does data come in?
EPR legislative frameworks are designed to hold manufacturers accountable for the end of life impacts of their plastics products. As this WWF paper neatly sets out, EPR requires collaboration and input from all actors in the plastic value chain to incentivise, support and enable a circular economy through both upstream and downstream interventions, from more sustainable packaging design to better policy instruments to reduce pollution and the infrastructure to force manufacturers to take on the financial burden of plastic waste recovery and reprocessing.
Fundamental to this is:
“a genuine and transparent process of collaboration and open sharing among key stakeholders throughout the entire value chain of waste management in any specific country. These stakeholders include national government, local authorities, business and producers, waste management companies, trade unions, the informal sector, and NGOs.” WWF 15 Basic Principles
Producers need to know where their waste ends up. Governments need to be able to monitor the effectiveness of EPR legislation — does it have a material impact on the amount of plastic that ends up in the environment. And civil society organisations need good quality data to be able to hold all parties to account and to challenge ineffective implementation.
How we ensure data quality
When we first had the idea for wastebase.org, our plastic data monitoring platform, we knew two things:
- We wanted everyone involved in the plastics value chain to be able to access the data easily
- Our data had to be robust and high quality at all times — otherwise it’s useless.
For every bottle scanned in Wastebase, we aim to link the product barcode to data points about:
- location (where it was found)
- time (when it was found)
- volume (which helps identify the size and weight of the bottle)
- weight and type of plastic material (where it is possible to measure accurately — look out for a future article about that)
- product label (name)
- brand
- manufacturer (the company that owns the brand)
We can then visualise and report on things like the total weight of plastic made by a single company, or the amount of plastic found in one location mapped against the location of the brand’s parent company (see example image below).
Curating contributers
You can’t contribute data to our platform unless you’re logged in. If you want a login, you need to tell us a bit about yourself and your drivers for submitting data. This means we can choose people and organisations who have a genuine commitment to collecting plastics data and who understand how and why to collect it properly.
Data validation training
We have formal agreements with data partners in the countries we work in. these are established environmental NGOs who are already working to combat plastic pollution. We provide data training to their staff and volunteers to explain and emphasis the importance of, for example, not double counting.
For anyone running a large brand audit, we offer training on how to use both the app and the platform to input data, run regular quality checks and extract data.
In most cases, we find that, once we explain why data quality is important, most trainees instinctively get it and take it pretty zealously. It’s their business to gather evidence so they want to get it right.
Designing out margins for error
We identify products down to the level of the barcode. It’s actually quite difficult for someone to make up a barcode if it doesn’t exist. That tends to force people to make an effort to identify products properly and not put in things that aren’t there.
Of course, humans make mistakes. As mentioned above, we have the ability for validators to go in periodically and check data. We’ve built up a good understanding of common errors, for example, people quite often get labels (the name of the product, such a ‘lemon drink’) mixed up with brands (such as ‘Fanta’). Some people attribute one product to one brand when it’s a different brand with a similar name. We can pick that up and correct it — we run regular reports (such as our monthly data report) so we can spot errors. We also get to know common brands (most waste in the countries we work in is produced by handful of brands, as we found in this audit in Nakuru, Kenya, where 38% of bottles found were from companies based in the US (and most of those owned by the Coca-Cola Company).
We’re transparent
All of the information we produce is publicly available. You can see it on our portal and get a regular summary of it in kaggle if you want — it’s right there. We welcome questions and commentaries about the data.
We use public, established data sources to validate our information
Whenever we create a brand or manufacturer record, we use the information the company itself has published to check we’re inputting the right details (such as their company website or product labels). Where available, we also add a link to information about that company on a public records platform like OpenCorporates and Companies House (the UK Government’s company registration portal).
We’re improving our data tools
We’ve just released a new ‘audit areas’ feature in the Wastebase app. This allows users to define a specific geographical area, such as a park, market or street, to carry out a brand audit. They can link that area to a ‘group audit activity’ with an official start and end time, then carry out a localised brand audit. The data from the audit area is immediately available as a specific dataset in wastebase.org.
This feature allows organisations involved in plastic monitoring to take a much more proportionate statistical sample based on a specific area and then do another sample in the same area at a later date (or several times over). They can then compare the difference in bottle numbers calculate the density of plastic or number of bottles per square metre — something we’ve described in our ‘bottles per hectare’ concept. As far as we know, no one else has found a way to do this. This means we can identify problem areas for plastic and identify the companies responsible for the plastic build up in those areas. Our partners can use this data as evidence in discussions with municipal waste management, both to improve collections and to contribute to EPR-related monitoring and intervention.
There are (currently) no international standards for a maximum density of plastic in a residential area (that we know of), as there are for, say, air pollution. Wouldn’t this be a useful thing to establish?
Why we believe in the power of data
In each of the African countries where we’ve collected most of our data — Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia — fewer than 10 manufacturers account for over 80% of the waste bottles. That means that the number of firms who need to change their behaviour in order to make EPR work is relatively small. We think data can provide the visible evidence to encourage change.
