What happens to a package after you are finished with it? A bottle, a cardboard sleeve, a mailer, a charger box: all of these seem minor independently, until we enter the maze of bins, collection systems, producer obligations, recycling markets, municipal capacity, and public behavior.

In this episode of Decisions at the Fulcrum, I visit Sweden 🇸🇪 to look at the Extended Producer Responsibility system. It's a case showing how "ordinary" objects require extraordinary decision-making occasions.

Today's guide is morphological analysis, a method developed by Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky and then adapted by Tom Ritchey and others for complex policy and organizational decision-making.

Rather than rushing toward an answer, morphological analysis needs decision makers to first map the field: identify the parameters, list possible conditions, and try out combinations to see which can genuinely hold together. It is a method for uncertainty, structure, and creative problem-solving.

Through Sweden's producer-responsibility planning, I examine waste and recycling as a conundrum of distributed responsibility. Producers, consumers, municipalities, recyclers, regulators, and markets all make what happens after the product is used. Morphological analysis is the best fit for intricate decision instances like this one because it addresses a better (and harder) question: what future/s are we assuming, and do all the pieces of a strategy seem coherent together?

Relevant Show Links:

https://www.swemorph.com/pdf/gma.pdf 

https://www.oneplanetnetwork.org/knowledge-centre/policies/extended-producer-responsibility-sweden 

Note:

🎵Track by Trabant from Epidemic Sound. Commercial Use Allowed Licensing

🎵Track by Rune Dale from Epidemic Sound. Commercial Use Allowed Licensing.