Our economy is built on the transformation of raw materials into products and services. Until recently the waste produced as part of this process or at the end of this product’s life was seen as an unavoidable part of this process. However, global economic growth is putting rising pressure on depleting resources, leading to a re-examination of how we consume resources and generate waste (and deal with that waste).
In May 2010 RICS commissioned us to produce a ‘think-piece’ on the future of sustainable waste management to provoke discussion and encourage questions about the future of cities in a ‘zero waste economy’. The overall aim of this research was to explore trends and
issues on waste and to tease out possible implications for both the urban form in general as well as the processes involved in the planning, development, and occupation of thebuilt environment. Yesterday the Guardian published this article on our work.
From our analysis, it is clear that for the effective management of sustainable cities, waste disposal and how it is facilitated is crucial. A collaborative approach between the private sector, local authorities, planners and developers will need to be taken to ensure cities and buildings of the future are sustainable and will meet the needs of generations to come.
You can read the full report here. We have done more work on scenarios and trends of sustainable lifestyles and waste which can be perused here on resource efficiency and food down the supply chain and here on understanding future waste arisings and composition.
Open data open season
As the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) reports on the latest pressure brought to bear on the Government’s Open Data initiative, signs of a thriving and well-resourced statistics and data-based movement abound.
The UK Statistics Authority, with Andrew Dilmot now in the chair, have instructed the Office of National Statistics to ensure that all responses to data requests are promptly made publicly available. This represents part of an effort to open up official statistics to the wider community, in as helpful and timely a manner as possible. One estimate of the considerable value to the UK economy of open data suggested that it could be worth £6 billion.
Indeed, as statisticians everywhere may or may not be looking forward to the International Year of Statistics in 2013, the statistics world is all a-bustle. The RSS has launched getstats as part of an effort to improve our collective ability to handle numbers. Meanwhile, fullfact, an independent not-for-profit organisation, investigate claims made by politicians and the media and provide useful insight into overall accuracy, reliability of sources and applicability of figures across contexts. Elsewhere Straight Statistics, a campaign run by journalists and statisticians make similar efforts, including the publication – in collaboration with Sense about Science – of the excellent short guide ‘Making sense of statistics‘. Also notable in this thriving field is Ben Goldacre, whose Bad Science blog relentlessly pursues poor science and statistics.
A number of media outlets now run data-focused sections, for example the Guardian’s Data Store, and this week sees the announcement of the publication of the Data Journalism Handbook, an open source international collaboration which hopes to see clearer and more accurate use of data in the media.
An extraordinary variety of blogs, campaigns and information repositories can easily be discovered online, representing a seemingly concerted effort to help us all to navigate an often difficult world of numbers and facts, bewilderingly varied in quality, provenance and integrity of motivation.
Already the widespread availability of data has changed the ways in which we are able to work, shifting the emphasis from skill-at-finding towards skill-at-understanding. Accompanying efforts to increase numeracy, statistical fluency and assessments of data or fact quality must be welcomed, both to facilitate better understanding, and to protect us all from misleading notions, whether accidental or cynically motivated.