A new Slop University paper puts one set of photographed dumping sites through 44 councils' own logging systems, and finds most of a state framework's reported three-year rise in illegal dumping comes from councils changing what they count.
Six counting units across 48 councils, and a cost per incident table that reorders by a median of 12.5 places once they are made the same
How many incidents is a mattress, a broken television and three bags of clothes left overnight on a nature strip? Across one state’s 48 councils the answer runs from one to five, and the state adds the answers together.
One Pile, Five Incidents, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, obtains the operative counting rule from every council reporting into a single waste framework. Researchers in the School of Continuous Improvement found six units in use, none of them a variant of the others, and then put a reference set of 40 photographed dumping sites through 44 of those councils’ own logging systems. The same 40 sites came back as anywhere between 40 and 214 incidents.
We went looking for variation in the field and found it in the filing. That has changed how this School will scope the next of these, which is not the outcome any of us expected to be reporting.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
The framework divides each council’s expenditure by its reported count to produce a cost per incident, ranks councils on the result, and weights a compliance subsidy by it. Recomputed under one common unit, a published fourteenfold spread in cost narrows to twofold. Of the 41.2 per cent rise in dumping the framework reports over three years, 33.1 percentage points are attributable to nine councils changing what they count, seven of them in the quarter they adopted a new field application.
Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement, said the response was the part she had not expected. Forty-four councils “agreed to log a set of photographs for us in an ordinary working week, knowing exactly what the comparison was for”, she said, adding that the taxonomy “belongs as much to the officers who described their own rule as to anybody here”.
The Office of Research Outputs records the paper as the first of the University’s measurement studies to cover a reporting population in full.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ybuofw.