Member of the month: Springloop Coorperatie

Springloop Cooperatie UA is an international knowledge organisation with a focus on the socio-economic and governance aspects of integrated sustainable waste management (ISWM), and a high level of technical expertise on informal and formal activities and business in recycling and waste minimisation. Our specific focus is on the contributions and activities of private value chains, from the highest level of corporate recycling companies (many of them based in Asia) to the smallest micro-enterprises recycling aluminium, repairing smart phones, renting wedding clothing, or earning money to feed their families by collecting beverage containers to redeem in deposit return systems. 

My name is Anne Scheinberg. I grew up in New York City, on the banks of the Hudson River. My mother was one of the first USA environmentalists, and I was very interested in the movement to clean up the Hudson. In 1970 (when I was 17), I joined an organisation that built a replica of a 17th-century sailboat and sailed the Sloop Clearwater on the Hudson, with many events and a lot of scientific research. It was clear to me that I wanted to work on the environment, but also clear that I wasn’t cut out to be a natural scientist like my father or grandfather.

In 1977, after studying and working for a few years in Washington DC, I returned to the Hudson Valley and was lucky enough to be recruited to manage community recycling centres operated by a social enterprise that provided work for teenagers from low-income communities. When the project finished after 4 years, I transitioned to working for one of the private recycling companies that had been buying our glass and aluminium, and became a glass buyer. To get the glass I had to invent the municipal collection systems and figure out about the communication and instructions to institutions and individuals. When DRS was introduced in three of the states that were our primary source of materials, there was no need for a buyer, and I was asked to become a recycling co-ordinator at Newark, New Jersey, the largest really poor city in the USA. New Jersey was a national leader in recycling systems, and I became part of the first cohort of Recycling Coordinators, most of us in our late 20s and early 30s. It was a very exciting time. Dumpsites were closing, recycling was a serious part of the solution, and we were a close group of people working on recycling and composting in early adopter states and provinces on both sides of the USA-Canadian border.  

I was then recruited by the State of Massachusetts to design the first regional public-financed recycling system in North America, and in order to do that, I started my first recycling consulting company, Recourse Systems. Our team of 5-6 employees and Associates wrote many of the first recycling plans in the Northeast of the USA, analysed waste composition for incinerators and landfills, and worked on figuring out how to collect organics and compost them in cities and towns all over the Northeastern USA, learning also from colleagues in Ontario who invented the blue box, an extremely successful set-out container for door to door (“curbside” in North America) collection of mixed source separated recyclables.  

I was then recruited by the State of Massachusetts to design the first regional public-financed recycling system in North America, and in order to do that, I started my first recycling consulting company, Recourse Systems. Our team of 5-6 employees and Associates wrote many of the first recycling plans in the Northeast of the USA, analysed waste composition for incinerators and landfills, and worked on figuring out how to collect organics and compost them in cities and towns all over the Northeastern USA, learning also from colleagues in Ontario who invented the blue box, an extremely successful set-out container for door to door (“curbside” in North America) collection of mixed source separated recyclables.  

In 1985, I went to a recycling conference in Berlin (East Berlin) and met some Finnish recycling activists (together we were five women in a conference of about 1900 men in (polyester) business suits). They invited me to give a lecture tour in Finland to explain how recycling could be implemented in a systematic way. I remember one of those meetings, I showed slides of specialised collection vehicles. When the first slide showing a truck appeared on the screen, all of the men in the room sat up straight and many of them put on their glasses. 

In 1997, I transferred the company to one of its associates, to allow me to accept a year-long research grant to study the first generation of privatisation of municipal waste countries in two state socialist countries, Hungary and Bulgaria. There are a lot of stories I can tell about that…and it indirectly led me to shift from working directly on waste and recycling to becoming a specialist on waste management and recycling in the development context. In the 15 years I worked for Waste Advisers in the Netherlands, I was in or supporting about 80 different countries on all continents, in their search to integrate recycling into their waste management systems, and also to understand how to work with the recycling industry. In that work, I was able to use my recycling knowledge to help cities, regions, and donor organisations like GIZ, to better understand the contributions made by the informal recycling sector.  

What inspired you/ your organisation to join ISWA, and how has ISWA helped in your career?

I became a member of ISWA when working at WASTE Advisors in the Netherlands. I was inspired by the way that creating an association had supported us, as young professionals, to develop an entire discipline of integrated waste management, and how this enriched our work, our networks, and our reach. I was getting my PhD when I joined, and was a student member for a few years, and then an individual member, and for the last few years an organisational member. 

I was also inspired by a community of practice that was started by Carl Bartone of the World Bank in the mid-1990s, called the CWG, The Collaborative Working Group on Solid Waste Management in Low and Middle-income Countries. Four organisations formed the core, the World Bank, GIZ (German International Cooperation, then German Technical Co-operation), ERM-UK (a consultancy, with David Wilson leading the waste division, SKAT, the  Swiss Centre for Appropriate Technology, and WASTE Advisors. The CWG was a safe place to explore whether the evolution of integrated waste management in the Global North could serve as the model for modernising waste management in the Global South, a question which remains very relevant to this day. For me as a lifelong waste and recycling professional, the answer is that there is only a partial overlap, and “self-evident truths” from waste experts in the European Union and the USA and Canada require considerable modification to be useful — and not downright harmful — to countries such as South Africa, Brazil, China, Indonesia, and European-continent emerging. economies such as Bulgaria and Ukraine. I have come to understand that GDP and income level forms  a key difference between the development of modern integrated waste management in the USA, the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, and other “developed” economies in the 1980s and 1990s, and the donor-financed solid waste “upgrading,” closing dumpsites, and introducing integrated waste management in emerging economies now.  

As a result, the pressure for local or national authorities to charge adequately for environmentally safe waste management is missing. In the 80 low- and middle-income countries that I have visited for my work, I have seldom if ever encountered a disposal facility or a landfill — sanitary or controlled, or an MRF, or composting facility, or any other formal waste management facility — that was charging a tipping fee of more than US $25 or Euro 25 per tonne. That is not enough to operate the facility correctly, and that is why these facilities hardly ever operate once they are donated. 

My reason for joining ISWA was in the first instance to try and understand this dynamic, and later, because I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and am an idealist and an activist — to try to change that. 
All of which is a very long explanation of why a small group of us started Springloop Cooperatie UA in 2014, when I left WASTE Advisors, as a way of continuing the work on sustainable modernisation of waste management. And this is what we still work on, and why Springloop is a member of ISWA and I am a WG Chair.  

What are the biggest projects/ initiatives in waste management that your organisation has achieved so far?

Since 2014, we have been involved in supporting participatory and inclusive waste management and recycling planning and projects in quite a few emerging economies, many of them in Europe, and most of them with some type of focus on understanding the informal part of the recycling value chains, and supporting informal entrepreneurs and traders to have a more stable and respected relationship to the formal waste management authorities. I think the most unique aspect of our work is that we work with and around issues affecting the informal sector in Europe, including pre-accession companies like Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia, as well as in the European Union of influence, which would include (post-Ottoman empire)  countries such as Tunisia, Morocco and Turkey. 

Instead of “biggest,” I would like to tell you about three projects with the informal sector in the past 10 years that I am particularly proud of, that pushed the boundaries of “informal integration” by looking at the intersection of informal recycling and the private value chains. In 2018, we did a consultancy for the Aluminium industry in which we investigated why the recovery rates for Aluminium UBC were so low in five countries, including Bulgaria and Serbia, and three other Southeastern European EU member states. We framed the research question as: Is there a recycling gap or an information and reporting gap? The hypothesis was that informal recyclers were massively collecting aluminium cans and smelting them in informal foundries to make jewelry, so that the aluminium could no longer be tracked to come from beverage cans. What we found was that most of the cans were in the mixed waste, because the citizens simply were never clearly instructed to put them in designated containers. And that the informal sector were the only stakeholders actually recovering from mixed waste containers and dumpsites, contributing to the reported recovery to the EU. The answer was that there was both a recycling and an information gap and we provided some ideas about how to improve both. 

More recently we had a project in North Macedonia working directly with Roma (“gypsy”) informal settlements in the Skopje metropolitan area, where most people are living from metal and plastic recycling. Much of the plastic packaging being recovered was used for cooking fuel in the off-grid settlements. Working with a Roma member of Springloop, Sonja Barbul, who has since passed away, we were able to engage the women in one settlement and to mediate an agreement with Pakomak, one of the packaging PROs, to bring clean wooden pallets to the settlement and exchange them on a weight basis for dirty plastics. The women stopped burning plastics and burned the pallet wood instead, improving their indoor and outdoor air quality and health.

What are your biggest challenges so far?

On the one hand, the ideas about recycling and the informal sector are very vulnerable to shifting political winds, so that the types of projects we have done in the past are now seldom being requested or financed. Another challenge in the landscape we work in, if I am really honest, is the politicisation of recycling and the increasing tendency to blame the private recycling companies (the industrial value chains) for problems which, in my view, are created by the producers of projects and packages. The theory is that producers and marketing systems will solve these problems through (Extended) Producer Responsibility (EPR) initiatives, but the promise of  EPR has not yet been fulfilled, in my opinion. I come originally from North America, where I spent the first half of my career, and there, recycling is more fully integrated into the waste management service chain, because it is public entities, primarily cities and counties, that are the decisionmakers around recycling policy and systems. And they are also the ones selling the materials recovered at the curb and in drop-off centres to the value chains.  
As an organisation, Springloop is faced with, we a shrinking and aging membership of researchers and consultants. The positive side of this second challenge is that through ISWA we have come into contact with a number of very talented YPGs, and are looking forward to including some of them in new projects and proposals. 

In your opinion, what are the most pressing issues in the waste sector that should be addressed today?

As a person with one leg on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, I notice that there is a real disconnect between European and American (not only USA, but also Canadian and Latin American) ideas about recycling, disposal, and waste minimisation. This is part of what forms the geopolitical waste and recycling problem matrix (see below). The second disconnect is between high-income “developed” (rich) countries on the one hand, and emerging economies and their low- and lower-middle-income neighbours on the other. Some of these disconnects are well-documented in Andy Whiteman’s paper, The Nine Development Bands (with co-authors David Wilson and Mike Webster), which won the 2023 ISWA Publication Prize.  

For this occasion, I have made a small matrix showing how the idea of “development” differs in relation to solid waste and recycling depending on the economic and governance status of a country or region.