A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement audits 214 hard-rubbish piles across 11 suburbs, finding overnight removal's share of a council's diversion figure climbs from 42% to 81% across nine months while the figure itself barely moves.
A nine-month street audit finds most of a council's claimed diversion now happens before its own collection service arrives
Every fortnight, a hard-rubbish collection round closes with a single number: the share of what left a suburb’s verges that the council counts as diverted from landfill. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement spent nine months asking who actually did the diverting.
Dr Sten Okwuosa and Dr Renke Sabel photographed 214 verge-side piles across eleven suburbs at set-out, at dawn, and again when the truck arrived, matching each item’s disappearance against the council’s own round-level diversion entry. The figure itself barely shifted, holding in the high eighties across the nine-month window. The share of it attributable to someone’s overnight trailer rather than the contracted service climbed from 42% to 81% over the same period.
The figure stopped needing anyone to actually pick anything up somewhere around month six. That’s not usually how you’d want a number to behave.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas, School of Continuous Improvement
“Every indicator we chase starts out standing in for something and ends up mistaken for the thing itself,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons. “This one just got there rather quickly.”
The School of Continuous Improvement reads the result as one more entry in its long-running account of what an indicator quietly stops measuring once something else starts doing the work behind it.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.y74xj1.