One Pile, Five Incidents

Cross-Jurisdictional Variation in the Counting Unit for Illegal Dumping, and What It Does to a Benchmarked Cost Per Incident

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement obtains the operative counting rule for illegal dumping incidents from all 48 councils reporting into one state waste framework, and codes them into a taxonomy of six units: the collection job, the reported site visit, the discrete item, the material stream, the load band, and the attributable depositing event. Forty-four of the councils then logged a common reference set of 40 photographed dumping sites in their own systems, returning totals from 40 to 214 incidents for the identical sites, with a median of 58.5. In a crossed random-effects decomposition the council accounts for 63.8 per cent of the variance in log counts and the site for 24.1 per cent. Recomputing the framework's published annual total under a single common unit moves it from 31,864 incidents to between 13,290 and 61,405, narrows the published fourteenfold spread in cost per incident to twofold, and reorders the benchmark table by a median of 12.5 places. Holding each council's unit at its first-quarter definition removes 33.1 of the 41.2 percentage points of the framework's reported three-year rise. Supplying councils with site dimensions alongside the photographs changes the mean returned count by 0.5 incidents.

@misc{slop_ybuofw,
  author       = {Torun Ezeigwe and Joost Nwosu and Renke Sabel and Casimir Beng},
  title        = {One Pile, Five Incidents: Cross-Jurisdictional Variation in the Counting Unit for Illegal Dumping, and What It Does to a Benchmarked Cost Per Incident},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ybuofw},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-nature-strip-ybuofw/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}