Fit at the waste

It’s not that industry lacks imagination or ambition. To get us recycling more waste, what is needed are the right policy drivers. SITA’s Gev Eduljee and Marek Gordon venture into the problem, diagnosis and treatment.

A quarter of all household waste recycled by 2005? It’s the first statutory step to meeting the government’s targets on recycling, and diverting household organic waste from landfill. Fine and dandy objectives - but are we getting there?

Not to mince words, no. A DEFRA survey in April indicates that household waste recycling in England rose from 10.3% in 1999/2000 to 11.2% in 2000/2001. A distinctly modest improvement. Set against an underlying rising trend in the quantity of municipal waste dispatched to landfill (22.1 million tonnes in 2000/2001, compared to 20.6 million four years earlier), the prognosis hardly seems encouraging for the UK meeting its higher longer term recycling targets.

The reasons for this lacklustre performance? The House of Commons Environment Select Committee opined in its fifth report that “the majority of those involved with waste in this country appear to be guilty of thinking without imagination and planning without ambition, of finding problems rather than solutions”.

That’s tarring the waste industry, local and central government with the same brush. Yet higher recycling rates have been achieved elsewhere in Europe. The industry doesn’t appear to lack the imagination and ambition to do it there. And many of the companies involved are the same companies that work in Britain. What’s not the same is the context that service providers work in (whether public or private sector), the prevailing policies, fiscal measures and other legislative instruments designed to action the national waste strategy.

The government’s Performance and Innovation Unit has been given free rein to develop a framework for genuine change. This opportunity should not be wasted. At the heart of the problem lie four issues:

• If waste has intrinsic value, householders should be made to value it. In other words, the principles of producer responsibility should be extended. We should be alert to the costs involved, and pay the full management cost according to the amount and type of waste we generate. Most of us have no idea that our full waste collection and disposal service costs less than £1 per household per week. A system of direct charging, commonly accepted in other economies, would quickly raise the level of awareness.
• Recycling is more expensive than current disposal costs within the UK. Recognising and addressing this simple fact is key to raising recycling rates. A wide range of measures could rebalance the equation, including blunt instruments such as higher landfill tax.
• There is a clear correlation between high recycling rates, and legislation either banning or severely restricting direct disposal (Ontario, the Netherlands, Germany) and/or mandating kerbside recycling (Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Ontario, New York). But in the UK local authorities have no obligation to provide recycling infrastructure. Indeed many authorities find the financial burden too heavy to bear.
• We need to move faster on creating markets for recyclates separated from the household waste stream. The Waste and Resources Action programme should help, but the government can do much more to stimulate demand for secondary materials, using initiatives to set a minimum recycled content in different products, particularly those bought by government.

No legislative drivers will be effective unless we address the funding gap, between what government and local authorities currently provide, and what it will take to develop an efficient and effective recycling and recovery infrastructure. The UK starts from an extraordinarily low base here, which underlines the vast capital and operating expenditure required. It’s not unlike the argument on public transport: no investment in a working alternative, no move away from private transport.

Thus far, government has not fully grasped the waste management nettle, preferring to play at the margins with the taxation system, and provide only minor funds for development. Paradoxically, financial sanctions on local authorities for missing recycling targets will only exacerbate the problem, by removing resources from an already grossly under funded service sector.

Setting challenging targets does not in itself effect change. Household waste recycling can become a success story - but only if government tackles consumer responsibility head-on, and recognises the need for significant new funding.

Gev Eduljee is technical director and Marek Gordon is corporate development director at SITA.

23 September 2002

Gev Edulgee and Marek Gordon