Clinton had been reading a copy of Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins, a book which the Wall Street Journal credits as sparking a series of presidential speeches on business and the environment. Clinton's view is that developing countries in the new millennium won't need to be "energy hogs" to become rich … but we all will need to depart from some of the old ideas of the industrial era. Clinton: "I have been very convinced for years that it is no longer necessary to choose between growing the economy and preserving, and even improving, the environment … But it is quite necessary to abandon the industrial age energy use patterns."

One of the most obvious industrial age energy use patterns which is undergoing a major revolution is our attitude towards waste. As the global economy makes ever-greater demands on the natural environment, political, business and community leaders around the world are pointing to our waste stream and recycling as areas of new business and employment potential. Consequently, the waste issue has moved from the economic margins into the mainstream.

Zero Waste is also part of a "materials revolution" which is taking shape in the new economy. While the use of recycled materials is not new, the new opportunities opening up in this field are leading to the development of new technologies which are breaking down barriers to materials recovery. This, in turn, is leading to some spectacular productivity and efficiency gains in the business sector.

But, as Bill Clinton points out, all this starts with a change in mindset. It means addressing our waste not just because it would be better for the environment. We need to look again at waste because it also represents a flow of materials and resources which is gaining great value to our economy.

Tom Bentley, Director of the Demos think tank in London, argues that previous recycling activities failed to take off because the different parts of the overall system failed to combine "… in a victory of short-term over long-term thinking". Bentley says the solutions to waste and resource recovery lie in understanding the role of the productive system as a whole. He also observes that this change in thinking is bringing together two spheres of society that, at first sight, seem like strange bedfellows.

Bentley: "These two spheres include the leading edge of the knowledge economy, with its emphasis on networks, collaboration, and creativity, and the emerging global movement of Greens, community enterprise and local economic development, which exemplifies innovative capacity, self-reliance and sustainability. Between them they are helping shape a new path for capitalism which shows how radical changes in resource and material productivity can improve long-term business prospects and achieve real environmental progress…"

In early December, there was a national meeting in Kaikoura of the first fourteen district councils (see list) which have pledged to achieve as close as possible to 100% recycling and reuse of their waste streams by the year 2015. The point is to make disposal to landfills the absolutely last option for their local waste.

Don Riesterer is particularly keen on the employment that can be gained from a council's commitment towards the goal of Zero Waste: "In Opotiki we have high unemployment, sometimes up to 30% unemployed in the district, so the development of our Resource Recovery Centre has created some permanent jobs in this area. It's significant for the young unemployed people to get involved in creating a new set-up for our community. What's happened is that these young people have picked up the vision of Zero Waste for themselves. Not only has it increased their mana ... but it has also increased their employability later on..."

"Government environmental protection agencies acknowledge that every landfill will leak ... so somebody is going to pay a clean-up bill sometime. Swedish research now shows that the leachate toxicity of a landfill is still not benign after a thousand years. Even landfill professionals are now saying that we should assess the true costs of landfills based on looking after each of them for 500 years. But these same experts admit that the problem is still going to be there in 500 years! It is this disregard for future generations that lets us think that landfills are a cheap solution today.

"So when council's put a cost on their landfills, they seldom factor in all these ongoing expenses that will be with us for generations. When you truly work out the cost for landfills ... it usually comes out at about $100-$150 per tonne. But this still doesn't include the costs for up to or longer than 500 years, nor does it include the monumental costs of cleaning up environmental disasters from landfills that have already been built in the wrong places ... like the ones we have now which are built right next to rivers.

"The landfill debate can be summed up in this way: Materials are flowing though your communities. They have value ... but the value is being hidden from you. Getting access to that value - and the jobs that come with it - will come from choosing not to hide these materials any longer.

"At the moment, the whole system is designed for hiding it away. Councils have incentivised the system based around waste, but not incentivised a system based on recovery. Universities train people engineers in waste disposal, all the equipment and infrastructure costs are already committed to this purpose. Even the consenting process is big business. In the face of all this, recycling starts to look like a pesky little additional cost to the real work of disposing of things to a landfill.

"What we are saying is that when you compare landfills with recycling - and include all the real costs involved - then time and time again we can prove that recycling is economic. We say that Zero Waste is a competing technology to landfills ... but we have to change the mindset so that councils learn to invest in this new business to make it work."

"In ten years you can multiply the jobs by a factor of twenty. As the infrastructure grows around recycling as an alternative technology to landfilling, then still more opportunities for employment are created. So I'm predicting at least 40,000 jobs after ten years coming from a Zero Waste strategy..."

Some community and small businesses taking advantage of the new opportunities in resource recovery include:

The global trends are to replace the older low-level recycling initiatives with more intensive schemes, centred on better doorstep collections. The challenge for local communities and small businesses is to build an infrastructure for the re-use, repair and redistribution of the collected resources.

Example: the City of Canberra in Australia has a policy of "No Waste by 2010". It is developing an infrastructure to meet this policy and is breaking its waste stream down into "resource streams" including building and demolition materials, paper and cardboard, organic materials and garden wastes, naturally excavated soils, hard and soft plastics, glass and textiles. These resources are then publicised to attract and develop new industries.

The CLME philosophy has seen Germany applying modern production technology to such processes as mixed glass and mixed plastic sorting, to cleaning testing and refurbishing materials, to the automated recovery of materials from electrical and electronic goods, and to automobile disassembly. BMW, for example, now designs its cars to be 80% recyclable and has built a disassembly line near Munich to apply to dis-assembly the principles which Henry Ford applied in assembly. Similarly German construction firms are designing buildings which can be 80% recycled.

Local officials are calling the recycling trend the "New Gold Rush"… describing the new processing firms "...coming to the Golden State to mine California's newest natural resource — garbage".

A London Demos report, entitled "Creating wealth from waste", concludes that an intensive recycling programme in Britain would provide the scope for 15,000 jobs in collection and sorting and at least 25,000 to 40,000 jobs in manufacturing and reprocessing: 40-50,000 jobs overall.

The Demos report: "At a time when the conventional wisdom declares that governments can no longer create jobs using macro-economic levers, this is profoundly important. Because they are both practical and knowledge intensive, combining manual work with information management, the kind of jobs created also point to a new tier of employment that can help replace traditional manufacturing and industrial jobs…"

• Recent German studies estimate that the national waste and recycling industry has more than 1000 firms employing an average of 150 people each, with a turnover of between 80-100 billion DM per year. This is larger than employment in either steel or telecommunications in Germany. Of these 150,000 German jobs, 17,000 have been created through packaging recycling alone.

MFF: "Studies show that the value added to the economy from recycling can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars just from manufacturers using recycled feedstock. A local economy based upon materials reuse can also create many types of other jobs. At the front-end, research and development efforts provide employment to engineers, chemists, and other material specialists. At the back-end, construction workers, architects and engineers are needed to design and construct the facilities to handle the new supply of discard materials. Jobs and dollars also flow on to the other businesses in the communities such as the retail outlets, real estate and others."

But the quality of the work generated depends on the type of recycling methods chosen by the local authorities. The 1998 ground-breaking "Reinventing Waste" report, written for the London Planning Advisory Council (LPAC) by industrial economist Robin Murray, describes three choices:
— a capital intensive route, with wheeled bins, mechanised sorting and composting.
— a low skilled labour intensive route, with jobs concentrated in centralised sorting facilities
— a skilled labour intensive route, with jobs focused on kerbside sorting, householder communication, and system improvement.

A different route has been taken in Denmark. The Danish Trade Unions, foreseeing the loss of traditional waste jobs as the result of recycling, have established courses to upgrade refuse workers, developing skills in customer relations, materials handling, and data gathering and analysis.

The report: "These people are committed to the environmental impact of recycling, they have designed systems with a substantial degree of collector-household interaction, with kerbside recycling operatives separating recyclable materials. Bulking and sorting of materials at most existing London recycling depots involves operating forklifts and bulking and sorting source separated materials, not hand sorting mixed waste on a dirty conveyor-belt system. In the same way that a single kerbside recycler collects materials worth £200,000 once it is remanufactured, his or her job supports three additional jobs. At a time when new jobs are being created, it is important to ensure these are high quality jobs …"

But this is starting to change. As an outgrowth of the European packaging and recycling directives, the European auto industry, including BMW, Volvo, Saab, and Daimler-Benz, have made commitments to have cars that will be 80% (or higher) recyclable early this century.

US recycling market development analyst Pete Grogan comments: "In order to achieve the recovery of these cars, an entire "reverse logistics" infrastructure will be put in place. This infrastructure represents the missing half of the entire consumer product manufacturing event. Just as we have hundreds of manufacturing plants churning out automobiles worldwide, we will now have hundreds of plants with high-tech mechanised systems for disassembling autos ... with tens of thousands of new employment opportunities. The auto industry's commitment to consuming recycled materials in the production of new cars will represent the largest ever single opportunity for new market development and usage of recycled content products ..."

Wherever possible, the Tindall Foundation tries to link these categories to achieve a "double dividend". This means they prefer to fund employment initiatives that have an environmental dimension, and environmental initiatives that also create employment opportunities and have a focus on local economic development.

Grants are provided to projects to help with business planning, research and technical assistance. To qualify for funding, a project must be locally owned or a community enterprise, it must use a significant proportion of recovered materials, and help create new job opportunities.

• Stephen Tindall, as managing director of the Warehouse, is also working to ensure that he is running a company that practices what it preaches in terms of environmental goals. Tindall: "At the Warehouse, we understand that all business activities have environmental impacts. We believe we can make a difference in safeguarding our environment for present and future generations. Our long-term economic goal is to conduct our business sustainably. We are serious about our commitment and we have no illusions. This journey will be long and difficult..."

The Warehouse has set itself the goal of "zero waste to landfill" by 2020. In the next twelve months the company plans to reduce the amount of waste sent from stores to landfills by a third. Its environmental goals for this year also include recycling of paper, plastic and cardboard (which represent up to 80 per cent of total waste) at all its stores, developing a comprehensive "green guide" for all suppliers, and training of all employees in waste reduction.

To promote recycling, The Warehouse now sells a range of recycled products under the "Environmental Choice" label, an independently audited and internationally recognised brand. The company is actively encouraging suppliers and manufacturers to also support this initiative.

NZBCSD has been described in the media as a "pale green" alternative to the Business Roundtable. It is an off-shoot of the Geneva-based World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which promotes corporate social responsibility as "... the third pillar of sustainable development, along with economic growth and ecological balance." The membership of the World Council includes a Who's Who of transnational corporations including Dow chemical, Du Pont, General Motors, Monsanto, Shell and Toyota.

Stephen Tindall: "As key decision-makers in our society, it is essential that businesses take a leadership role in pursuing sound sustainable development for our communities. To this end, the NZBCSD is developing a basic framework of indicators and measures for businesses to use in reporting on environmental and social performance..."

Hawken will be a keynote speaker at a conference, entitled "Redesigning Resources — Growing the Economy While Healing the Environment", which will be held in Christchurch 25-27 June 2000.

Also speaking at the conference will be Ray Anderson, chairman and CEO of Interface Inc, and co-chairman of Bill Clinton's Council on Sustainable Development. Interface is a prime example of Natural Capitalism in practice: the company has shifted from selling traditional carpet ... to leasing "floor-covering services", using a new material that uses 97% less material, is more attractive, is cheaper to produce, and is completely recyclable.

The conference is an invite-only gathering, capped at 250 delegates. For more information contact Redesigning Resources, P.O.Box 6320, Upper Riccarton, Christchurch email: redesigningresources@hotmail.com.

OTHER SOURCES
interviews with Warren Snow by Jobs Letter editor Vivian Hutchinson November 30/December 1st 1999, and 8 February 2000;
Interview with Don Riesterer with Vivian Hutchinson 10 February 2000 ;
Bill Clinton speaking to Apec CEO Summit Auckland 12 September 1999 transcript in The New Zealand Herald 13 September 1999; Bill Clinton speaking 21 November conference in Florence, Italy quoted on www.natcap.org\text\pid28[1].html;
"Auto industry reverse logistics infrastructure" from email correspondence by Peter Grogan to Warren Snow August 1999;
Environmental statement from the Annual report of The Warehouse Group 1999;
The Independent 19 May 1999 "Muesli man sits at pale green roundtable" by Graeme Speden;