Recycling

Future economic growth depends on the efficient marshaling of energy, raw materials, and scarce financial capital. If developing countries make the transition to a recycling society most quickly and smoothly it will have the healthiest environment and strongest economy.

An inventory of discards would reveal metal wastes more valuable than the richest ones, paper wastes representing thousands of hectares of forests, and plastics wastes incorporating highly refined petrochemicals. That these products rich in raw materials and concentrated energy are frequently considered worthless is indicative of a distorted economic system. We are literally throwing away our future.

Recycling offers the opportunity to trim waste disposal needs, and thereby reduces disposal costs, while simultaneously combating global environmental problems. Recycling metals, paper, glass, plastics, and organic wastes would lessen the demand for energy and materials.

Managing solid waste is a global problem: Refuse is produced throughout the world. But it is also a local problem in that there is no such thing as global waste stream. The cumulative waste management decisions made by local and national governments affect global energy balances, the rate at which the atmosphere warms, and the amount of pollution emitted into the environment. They also affect international trade flows and the accumulation of debt. Individuals are not powerless in the face of these problems that sometimes seem too abstract or remote for constructive action. The degree to which people and nations act together to conserve raw materials and energy resources can slow the rate at which the global ecosystem is altered.

In the growing cities the volume of discarded materials is surpassing the available managerial and physical capacities to dispose of them. Municipalities must watch their piling garbage piles and mounting problems. Adequate waste management infrastructure does not exist. No effort is being made to reduce waste volumes and recover recyclable materials.

Recycling programs that require not only a new way of thinking about waste but greater involvement by a host of small, dispersed participants face even greater institutional barriers. Despite these obstacles, our cities should integrate recycling into our waste management plans. These cities will thus save money by avoiding disposal costs and by selling secondary materials.

Getting consumers to participate and establishing markets for recovered materials are the keys to successful recycling programs. Several approaches have effectively increased recovery rates and sales opportunities. Consumers can segregate their recyclables for pickup, permit others to retrieve the valuable components, or pay for a central processing plant to separate them. They may also return selected items to the place of purchase or take them to a collection or redemption center.

The demand for recovered products can be enhanced by meeting the resource needs of regional industries, exploring new uses for secondary materials, and offering economic incentives to waste processors and companies that use recycled materials as product inputs. Procurement policies that either favor or explicitly do not discriminate against goods made with post-consumer wastes also boost demand. Market stimulation simultaneously requires guaranteed supplies of high quality secondary materials. Competition from virgin resources and industry standards for the finished product set the operating parameters. If recycled materials are not as reliable, they will not be used.

Programs geared to the recycling of specific products often include a monetary incentive, usually in the form of a deposit. When consumers purchase carbonated beverages or milk jugs, for example, they may be charged separately for the container. If it is returned clean and intact, the consumer receives a refund. Once popular, voluntary deposit programs will go and most schemes shall be spurred by legislation.

Retailers can also purchase reverse vending machines to accept returned containers and disburse deposit refunds. After inserting their containers (as rapidly as one per second), customers are issued either cash or a redeemable voucher, sometimes accompanied by promotional coupons. Most of the machines are designed to accept aluminum, but reverse vending machines that accept glass are already on the (Western) market.

Recycling programs are most effective when integrated within a city’s overall solid waste management plan. If added as an afterthought, and implemented outside of the waste collection system, recycling schemes typically have lower recovery rates.

To encourage the use of recycled products, government can require its purchasing agents to buy competitively priced goods that contain a certain percentage of post-consumer stock. Reports, laws, and different forms printed on recycled paper, government vehicles lubricated with refined oil, and public roads paved in part by recovered rubber all represent huge markets.

Use of recycled paper by government agencies is important not only because of the volume of government purchases (creating a large market demand), but also because government procurement arrangements will be used by province, local and private organizations as a model to establish programs of their own to buy recycled paper. Additionally, as the market grows for recycled paper, the unit cost will go down, reducing costs for all organizations.

If government is going to encourage recycling, it must also take some responsibility for enlarging secondary materials market. Government regulations and fiscal incentives may compel manufacturers to produce recyclable products and packaging.

Law should require all levels of government and government contractors to purchase “items composed of the highest percentage of recovered materials practicable, consistent with maintaining a satisfactory level of competition.”

Government can also generate markets by encouraging manufacturers to use more discards in their production processes and altering nonessential quality standards. Tax incentives to encourage the purchase of recycling equipment are an approach that will gain favor.

Less waste means less demand for expensive garbage-hauling equipment and waste transfer stations, as well as the loss of habitat for disease-spreading insects and rodents. Greater use of recyclable materials cuts the needs for imported resources, cuts the need for imported resources, reduces energy consumption, and curtails water and air pollution. Societies that recycle can more efficiently and less expensively allocate scarce energy and materials among growing populations. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Reengineering the Politics

Pakistan is a country that runs politics without politicians. And this has remained a major, if not the sole, obstacle against political stability in the country. The conviction of the people suffers from a serious scarcity of politicians with the capacity of perceiving, exploring and exploiting political-democratic opportunities for their necessitous citizens. This scarcity has left Pakistan with the option of practicing politics without politicians. And the result has remained the same: despair, pessimism, cynicism, and neglected pile of problems such as unemployment, poverty and a broken society.

Politics in Pakistan is a ghastly pursuit—what helps one group is thought inevitably to harm another; what benefits one must hurt the other. It is a politics of despondency. In the name of advancing the interests of one's own group, it rejects attempts to educate, pressure, or change the society as a whole, thus accepting the status quo and revealing its essentially conservative nature. It is a politics of defeat and demoralization, of pessimism and narcissism. By seizing as much as possible for one's self and group, it exposes its complete disregard for the whole from which it has separated—the rest of the society. It thus rejects the search for a just and comprehensive solution to social problems. It is fundamentally conservative, working against progressive change and supporting the status quo.

In politics of Pakistan the intent is acquisition of power, and a culture prevails where people as well as the nation have become insensitive to human values and feel no hesitation in trampling over the rights of others. The ambition for power has thus turned out to be the tumbling block for establishing peace, equality and a true sense of fellowship. Such exhortation to goodness and moral superiority will remain in a pious ideal if our political leadership failed to translate it in social and political policies.

As ill luck would have it, the name of the game in Pakistan has become winning the elections and not incessant development and prosperity for all. Consequentially, problems such as unemployment, inflation and rule of law are bumping up and no political entity in Pakistan seems concerned. The only implicit, overt and covert concern is for power.

The manifestos of all political parties are no more than points of etiquette. They lack the power to foster commitment, motivation and clarity of vision and purpose. They do not surround certain principles and processes, which are properly observed in their development and deployment. They fail to connote the manifesto of political parties forming the basis for strategic direction and daily action. They are not developed in ways that they become powerful tools. Our political parties do not adopt the new philosophy, institute leadership, and eliminate slogans and exhortations. They fall short of doing away with personal goals and putting everyone to work to accomplish transformation. This requires leadership and commitment to a common mission, which all political parties lack.

Perhaps Z. A. Bhutto was the first (and the last) to offer a program that ignited the spirits of people. Today’s political organizations, including the party he left behind, lack agenda, harmony with values, inspiration, motivation and the ability to capture the heart and soul of the people. Consequently, whatever deficient programs these parties offer are identical, monotonous and ambiguous. They only differ in phraseology and verbosity.

Manifestos of most major political organizations are substance deficient. Even during a supplementary election recently held in my vicinity, I could not determine the main thrusts of political agendas of the contestant political groups (one candidate supported by a coalition of PPP, MMA, PML-N, Tehrik-e-Insaf while the other represented PML-Q). The entire campaign pivoted around attacks and counter-attacks. I could not even grasp the vision of PML-Q. Different leaders had different interpretations. Regrettably, no political party in Pakistan has a stated vision.

For all our political groups are without the vision people are locked in their past and present and incapable of imagining a future that will be better, they’ve lost hope. Politics has thus become mere “business,” horse-trading, squabbling about power with little sense of the ends to which power is the means. Gaining and holding on to power has become the purpose. For vision is what generates purpose for a society, without vision public life in Pakistan has become a battle of interests, unconstrained by a larger horizon of meaning. By and large, the losers are the powerless and the vulnerable—the luckless people.

By having a manifesto with people’s soul in it, a political party can have continuity. This is one of the major benefits of managing and leading by a manifesto developed by a participative process. It provides a long-term continuity and help leadership to maintain a long-term competitive advantage because it has direction and purpose. And when individual values are harmonized with those of the political enterprise, people work together for common purpose that is deeply felt. They contribute more as a team than individually. Thus the productivity not just gets better it gets dramatically excellent.

Today Pakistan is in dire need of people-service engineers, political-democratic entrepreneurs, and change agents who can dedicate their careers to the job of serving their people in solving their micro and macro-societal needs.

Pakistan needs those political leaders who can yield their personal interests to national interests and have the need of maintaining public accountability; who can keep the political machinery going for the future growth of their political career which is needed by the society; and who can discern that the military is right there seeking and watching out to grab power and impose dictatorship.

The new challenge lays ahead—the challenge to enable society to operate in dynamic balance with the threatening external environment. The nation yearns for leadership capable of providing direction and inspiration needed to survive and prosper into the 21st century. Pakistan desperately needs political re-engineering for driving the nation toward survival and prosperous future.Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Seeking new Pastures in Education

The state of education in Pakistan is depressing. Today we cannot compete even with third-rate countries in standard indicators of academic achievement. Weak curricula and discipline have guaranteed educational failure for tens of millions of our children. The nation should therefore look to itself and conclude that something must be done.

We are perhaps after increasing the number of educational institutions and ignoring the future of education, which is about the demise of the classroom-based teacher, and an information technology lead revolution in schools, colleges and universities.

For meeting our future economic needs, we must not lose sight of the fact that education is a process, not a commodity. It benefits the individual, and society as a whole, in all sorts of ways that are not necessarily quantifiable in terms of our national balance sheet.

Developed societies use teachers not as objects, but engines of education reform. Contrarily, our policymakers use them not as engines but tail cabins. Thus teachers are not involved in policy process for education. We need to see teachers as custodians of intellectual and cultural tradition, not servants of a government mission.

The report of the Pakistan Task Force on Improvement of Higher Education estimates that 18 million people are in the age between 17 to 23 years, eligible for tertiary education. Out of them, only 475,000 (or about 2.6%) are actually enrolled in higher education institutions. This proportion is among the lowest in the world: India (in 1990) had a tertiary enrolment ratio of 6.2%, while Iran (in 1994) had 12.7%. This is pathetic. It asks for direction and relevancy of higher education research.

Higher education in Turkey is worth talking about. The average annual growth rate of students in higher education in Turkey during the period 1980-85 was one of the highest in the world: 14.1% as compared to 7.8%in Canada, 5.0% in the UK, 1.4% in Italy, 0.2% in the US, -0.2% in Hungary, and -5.3% in Poland. The number of students enrolled in engineering is high: 18.33 %of the total enrollment as compared to 8.20 %in Italy, 7.90 %in Austria, and 3.29 %in France. In the area of higher education, can we seek some route from Turkey’s experience?

People need more education than ever before, and distance learning—connecting cable and classroom—offers a way to meet that need. Internet delivers course material to homes or offices. Discussions, assignments and exams are being done online. Some of these are courses offered by traditional universities, of which the University of Phoenix is the largest, some by accredited virtual universities with no on-campus instruction and some by unaccredited institutions. For many students, however, especially those with full-time jobs or those far from campuses, the savings in commuting and the flexibility to make their own schedules make the total cost less than that of alternatives.

The concept of virtual university is not a bad idea, which Pakistan must adopt at a large scale. It can distribute cheap Internet access and classroom content to modular learning kiosks in several thousand villages. Distributing several thousand simple, mass-produced kiosks might be less expensive than creating even one old-style university campus.

Pakistan has recently allocated resources greater than ever before. Nonetheless, it didn’t fully utilize even what paltry had been allocated earlier. Owing to intricate bureaucratic labyrinth drawing money is like pulling teeth. Consequently, the trend of spending in Pakistan is far less than the allocated money in all eight plans. There are around twenty-two steps to draw the allocated money. For survival in the new world, Pakistan has got to adopt new ways of governance.

South Korea offers an interesting paradigm in modern history. Most observers agree that it's spectacular progress in modernization and economic growth since the Korean War is largely attributed to the willingness of individuals to invest a large amount of resources in education.

Korea's liberation from Japan marked a turning point in the history of education. As the country underwent a transition from totalitarian rule to democracy, a primary concern was to provide everybody with equal educational opportunities. The period from 1945 to 1970 witnessed a dramatic expansion of education. In spite of the widespread destruction and economic suffering brought about by the Korean War (1950-1953), Korea succeeded in virtually eliminating illiteracy. Such a rapid expansion was naturally accompanied by problems, the most serious being deterioration in the quality of education. As the 1960s drew to a close, Korea's educators turned their attention to these problems and several projects were launched to improve the curricula and the methods of instruction

Although only primary school was compulsory in Korea, proportion of age-groups of children and young people enrolled in primary, secondary, and tertiary level schools were equivalent to those found in industrialized countries, including Japan. The percentage of students going on to optional middle school the same year was more than 99 percent. Approximately 34 percent, one of the world's highest rates of secondary-school graduates attended institutions of higher education in 1987, a rate similar to Japan's (about 30 percent) and exceeding Britain's (20 percent). The number of students in higher education had risen from 100,000 in 1960 to 1.3 million in 1987, and the proportion of college-age students in higher education institutions was second only to the United States.

Can Pakistan learn from the South Korean experience that explains the important role of education in its evolution from one of the world's poorest countries 50 years ago eating dogs to fuel the stomach, into a major economic success today?

A serious look at the state of the world raises a question regarding the thought process of Pakistan’s decision makers. Years of traditional education are no guarantee of a mature intellect. Entrenched mentalities need to change or institutions will continue to play the same old games and repeat the same old tunes. Schools of the future have an opportunity and responsibility to change the tune. Asif J. Mir Organizational Transformation

The McWorld raiding the Culture

Today’s global economy has a tendency to insulate consumers from the various negative impacts of their purchases by stretching the distance between different phases of a product’s lifecycle—from raw material extraction to processing, use, and disposal. Yet at the same time, social challenges accompanying economic globalization call for innovative forms of political mobilization across international borders. Shifting to more sustainable patterns of consumption and production worldwide will require pursuing new ground rules in order to forge a global economy based on protecting cultural values.

What we see is the onrush of the economic, technological, and ecological forces mesmerizing peoples everywhere with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment, commerce and especially the culture.

Today, the global spread of McWorld is rapidly bringing the consumer society of USA to the rest of the planet. The globalization of the consumer economy is closely linked with the general economic boom and growth in the movement of goods, services, and money across international borders, which accelerated during the 1990s.

McDonald’s operates 30,000 restaurants in 119 countries and serves 46 million customers each day. Its total revenue was $15.4 billion in 2002. On opening day in Kuwait City, the line for the McDonald’s drive-through was over 10 kilometers long. McDonald's has also spread expeditiously across Pakistan in almost 5 years with 18 restaurants in major cities. Strangely, there is no McDonald’s outlet in Peshawar and Quetta. McDonald’s costs the same in Pakistan as in the US, and given the per capita GDP disparity between the two countries, it is the cheapest food in one country, while being one of the most expensive in the other.

Pizza Hut also operates a chain of outlets in Pakistan and planning further to invest approximately 1 billion rupees in expansion. The money is being used to open 20 new outlets.

Coca-Cola sells more than 300 drink brands in over 200 countries. More than 70 percent of the corporation’s income originates outside of the United States, and its net revenues reached $19.6 billion in 2002.

Meanwhile, corporate strategies focused on boosting consumer demand in Pakistan have lead to increases in purchases of all manner of goods, from cars and televisions to paper and fast food. While it is ethically problematic to suggest that developing countries are not entitled to have the same options for material consumption that have long been taken for granted by western consumers, the global adoption of industrial country–style consumption patterns would place unbearable strains on local cultures.

The 1990s saw the emergence of many important international agreements and commitments embracing the need to transform unsustainable patterns of consumption and production. Agenda 21, the action plan that emerged from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, called on international institutions and national governments to promote greater energy and resource efficiency, minimize waste generation, encourage environmentally sound purchasing, and shift toward pricing systems that incorporate hidden environmental costs.

The UN Commission on Sustainable Development has provided a useful annual venue for governments and others to discuss consumption and production issues. The deliberations have produced little concrete action though. There is no voice raised for conservation of social values.

At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, governments agreed to develop a 10-year framework of programs to accelerate the shift toward sustainable consumption and production. These include offering a better range of products and services to consumers, providing more information about the health and safety of various products, and establishing programs of capacity building and technology transfer to help share these gains with developing countries. The World Summit also generated more than 230 partnership agreements among diverse stakeholders.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has sponsored a series of meetings and papers aimed at encouraging governments to implement innovative sustainable consumption and production policies.

In all these forums, apart from consumption and production, no emphasis is laid on the issue of social influence. Unfortunately, the limited gains made since 1992 in shifting toward more-sustainable patterns of consumption and production have been largely overwhelmed by the continued global growth of the consumer society. The controversial lifestyle issues continue to haunt.

The breakdown of WTO negotiations in Cancún in September 2003 provided reform-minded governments and activists with an opportunity to push for bringing future trade negotiations into better balance with sustainable development concerns. The way forward, nevertheless, is not yet clear.

Several new initiatives have emerged in the corporate and financial sectors, including the United Nations’ Global Compact, which calls on participating companies to integrate nine core values related to human rights, labor standards, and environmental protection into their operations, and the Equator Principles, which call on leading banks to manage environmental and social risks in their lending operations.

The international trade negotiations can provide opportunities to push for policy reforms needed to promote more-sustainable consumption and production. All the same, WTO rules and negotiations can also be used to protect cultures and social taboos of the host countries of MNCs.

Brands like McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are not just cultural aggression but also an expression of power; once America lost its power these will go. It is nonetheless impossible to filter culture. In the past we hated the British raj but gradually adopted its symbols. Today we hate America and don’t want to adopt what we think is its culture. Pakistan must save its own culture to counter the onslaught. There is a need for reform in our culture, but this should not be obfuscated through this hatred or that. The only answer to the American cultural onslaught is the protection of Pakistan’s own culture. www.asifjmir.com

Making a Dead Set at Corruption

Corruption is an insidious plague that has a wide range of corrosive effects on society. It undermines democracy and the rule of law, leads to violations of human rights, distorts markets, erodes quality of life, and allows organized crime, terrorism and other threats to human society to flourish. As defined by Transparency International: “Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.” According to Kofi Annan, “Corruption hurts the poor disproportionately—by diverting funds intended for development, undermining a government’s ability to provide basic services, feeding inequality and injustice, and discouraging foreign investment and aid.”

The good news is that future of corruption is not so bright it will not entirely finish though.

No country is entirely free of corruption. Efforts to fight corruption encourage transparency and accountability, thanks to an increased understanding of corruption's social and economic costs. There is the need for expanding the econometric framework, as well as to more general future research directions and policy implications in the field of governance.

Corruption is principally a governance issue, a failure of institutions and a lack of capacity to manage society by means of a framework of social, judicial, political and economic checks and balances. Good governance and globalization (at both the country as well as at the city level) do matter for performance in terms of access and quality of delivery of infrastructure services.

Corruption is deeply embedded in the political culture and poverty of Pakistan. Regulatory bodies are particularly vulnerable to corruption as they have the power to make key decisions on profit-making activities. Corrupt regulatory bodies can thus dangerously impede economic development.

Discretion creates more opportunities for corruption than where regulatory requirements are laid out through clear, precise and formal rules. Debate about corruption tends to focus almost exclusively on the receivers of corruption, rather than the purveyors. Corruption is alive and well and living in myriads of places. Bribery is simply the way business is done in Pakistan.

Within Pakistan's political dynamics, corruption figures as a very critical element. Prevalence of corruption in various political regimes has been the main cause of their downfall. The incumbents have placed accountability and the anti-corruption drive very high on its agenda in form of NAB its operational approach is rather controversial.

Corruption increases the number of capital projects undertaken and tends to enlarge their size and complexity. The result is that, paradoxically, some public investment can end up reducing a country’s growth because, even though the share of public investment in gross domestic product (the total of all goods and services produced in a country in a given year) may have risen, the average productivity of that investment is dropped.

For a private enterprise, getting a contract to execute a project, especially a large one, can be very profitable. Therefore, managers of these enterprises may be willing to offer commission to politicians who help them win the contract. Conversely, in many cases the act of bribery may not start with the enterprise but with the officials who control the decisions. It is apparently impossible to win a government contract in Pakistan without first paying a bribe. Interestingly, the laws of certain major industrial countries regard commissions paid by domestic enterprises to foreign politicians as not only legal but also tax deductible.

In some of these phases, a strategically placed high-level official or elected leader can manipulate the process to select a particular project. He can also tailor the specifications of the design to favor a given enterprise by, for example, providing inside information to that enterprise at the time of issuance of tender.

The enterprise that pays the commission rarely suffers from the payment of the bribe, since it is fairly simple to recover that cost. First, if corrupt officials of winning the bidding competition assure it, the enterprise can include the cost of the commission in its bid. Second, it can reach an understanding with the influential official that the initial low bid can be adjusted upward along the way, presumably to reflect modifications to the basic design. Third, it can reduce its spending on the project by the amount of the bribe by skimping on the quality of the work performed and the materials used. Fourth, if the contract is stipulated in a cost-plus fashion, the enterprise can recover the cost of the commission by overpricing.

The first step towards tackling corruption is preventing it. In attempting to prevent the laundering of proceeds of corruption mechanisms need to set up to review suspicious transactions, and analyze financial information.

Transparency and accountability in matters of public finance must also be promoted, and specific requirements established for the prevention of corruption, in particularly critical areas of the public sector, such as public procurement.

Citizens have the right to expect a high standard of conduct from their public servants. They also have to participate in preventing public corruption. For these reasons there is a need to actively encourage and promote the involvement of non-governmental and community based organizations, as well as, other elements of civil society, and to raise public awareness of corruption and what can be done about it.

There is a requirement for the prevention of corruption in the judiciary. Decision-making should be entrusted to committees rather than individuals. Although this adds to the cost of regulation, it may eventually save money by facilitating mutual monitoring and accountability.

New attitudes, better financial systems, prosecution of the guilty, better management of diamonds and real accountability to the people … this is the agenda for change. In taking it forward, the leading role must obviously be taken by the people and Government. But tackling corruption effectively requires a real focus, coordinated action and shared responsibility. Everyone’s energies must be thrown behind this anti-corruption strategy. It is the key to a better future for the people of Pakistan. (www.asifjmir.com)