UK recycling: what will it take to get back on track?
MRW considers the future for recycling in the UK with an exclusive round table discussion, produced in association with FCC Environment, with leading representatives from the waste sector.
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Paul Taylor kicked off the debate by asking what a reliance on key targets would achieve, and said he wanted energy to be more a part of the debate. He had concerns about moving from a 50% to 70% target because of the quality of recyclate.
“There is a danger that we could end up recycling simply because there is a target to recycle,” he said.
Liz Goodwin pointed out that the balance would always change: “If you look back 10 years, you would have drawn a different line as to what was best to recover energy from and what was best to recycle.
Jane Bickerstaffe questioned whether the recycling figures were really stagnating or whether it was due to lower composting rates during a dry summer.
Colin Church agreed that the decrease in green recycling and clippings had had a negative effect. Goodwin said that unless all local authorities started collecting both plastics and food waste, England would not hit its target.
But Margaret Bates wondered what could be done to get to those people who ‘couldn’t be bothered’ to recycle. Church argued that 100% participation was not needed to hit the target but that widespread plastics and food waste collections are needed across England.
Richard McIIwain argued that better communication might help, for example, with better packaging labels. People are particularly confused about plastics recycling and some overcompensate - contaminating the waste stream - while others throw plastics in the residual waste. Bates added that, while she understood the need for education, appealing to a level of altruism had its limits and that perhaps more stick rather than carrot was needed.
Goodwin was more upbeat, arguing that WRAP research showed that most people were fairly committed to recycling and we should focus on them. But there was a worrying statistic that only 25% of people were putting the right thing in the right bin every time.
Susanne Baker thought there was still a lack of trust in the system which needed to be addressed. People did not believe that their waste was actually being recycled.
She said that while campaigns around recycling largely focus on environmental benefits, it might now need to shift towards the economic benefits and what councils can harness.
Ray Georgeson agreed that poll evidence suggested a lack of trust. But he also argued that some of the messages people held on to were outdated. It was a question of not losing the value of some of the old messages while moving forward.
Steve Lee pointed out that there was a tendency to focus on household recycling and to talk about numbers. But the industry had to think about the here and now as well as 10 years’ time. Recycling targets, he added, had provided momentum and were a good proxy. Without them we would still be stuck in 1980 where everything went in the same bin.
to go for the best solution and not the easiest solution,” she said.
Baker brought into the debate manu­facturing’s closer relationship with consumers and the impact it can have.
“Manufacturers are thinking about where they are going to position themselves in the future - things like the Government’s office for sciences Foresight report on the future of manufacturing absolutely made it clear that manufacturers will have to be closer to consumers.
“Manufacturers will be more embedded within communities, they will be smaller, they will want to own those resources and they will want to bring them back on-site. And we are starting to see some of the trendsetters really picking apart what that might mean.
Baker argued that more incentives were needed in the system, and that a lack of support for innovation in remanufacturing needed to be addressed.
producers overseas,” she said. “Offering more to their customers gives them a competitive advantage against those who are located far away and cannot have that sort of direct relationship with their customers.
McIlwain added that Keep Britain Tidy’s work with Waitrose found the retailer not only interested in communicating its CSR work but also wanting to work with trusted NGOs to help the consumer do the right thing.
Church picked up on Baker’s point about incentives, and argued that it was difficult in the current climate for the Government to offer incentives. What what was needed was talk about current opportunities, such as the opportunities for low-skilled employment in recon­ditioning goods. He added that the industry had been created because of regulation.
Taylor added that while the industry had grown on the back of legislation, it seemed clear that the benefits of recycling were not so clear to the public: “You switch the lights off and you save some money. You recycle - where is the benefit?” He was also concerned that the industry did not have a strong business model due to being created off the back of legislation.
However, Goodwin pointed out that resource constraints would bite at some point soon. And Baker added that electronics manufacturer Samsung had invested in a mine in Australia, “because they are absolutely seeing this as a long- term risk and positioning themselves accordingly”.
Church added that this was the sort of thing that started to drive real industrial interest and a political willingness to act.
Beadle agreed that there was a lot of confusion over what packaging could be recycled and what could not, and that this could lead to contamination of recycle or materials being wrongly put in with residual waste.
Bickerstaffe quoted the example of Belgium, which had achieved a 70% recycling rate with 25% going to energy recovery, which she argued has been a lot simpler for consumers to follow.
Georgeson added that Ovam, the public waste agency of Flanders, faced a public backlash at 70% diversion from landfill, with the balance going to energy recovery and practically nothing going to landfill. In order to take that approach it would need to be an integ­rated system and not just one focused on household waste.
Lee said he was hoping that future EU policy would look at resource use: “Morally, it’s not great to be a high consumption society ‘but, hey, look at our fantastic recycling rate’.
He said rigorous lifecycle assessments were needed as well as carbon and energy counting, and that these needed to be communicated to consumers. He said the industry and consumers were very reliant on designers, manufacturers and retailers to start taking full life cycle costing into account.
Bates added that having a better resource-efficient business model gave companies a better relationship with their customers. While it often took a bit more of a hard sell initially, she said that once you had sold the message then it was easier for companies to sell them everything else along those lines.
Some councils such as Enfield had been running campaigns highlighting the tangible benefits of recycling to the public, said Beadle. But this type of message can be difficult to get across when the public believe that councils make profits - for example, from parking fines.
“Councils don’t make profits, they have a budget and a set of statutory duties. But do they get any support from central Government - no they don’t,” he commented.
McIlwain suggested that if councils received an income from recycling and this money was put towards improving a park or other facility, then that should be communicated to residents. Having an individual rebate was a clear benefit and, while some people might understand the wider benefit to society and the economy, the middle ground of how it benefits the council locally was important too.
He argued that the information given to the public needed to be framed in such a way as to simply communicate the different waste routes - energy, anaerobic digestion, recycling, pyrolysis - and their clear benefits.
“We need to have a debate about the proportion between recycling and EfW, the 70/30 Belgium type split. Do we want to create a market for EfW or is that actually something we would like to see decline significantly over time?
Church argued that there was broad agreement about how to achieve the goals discussed.
Baker said that a significant piece of work examining the implications of climate change on resource availability over the longer term could help with the communication message, but by itself this would not be enough.
And Georgeson, who was involved in the ‘Recycle Now’ campaign 10 years ago, compared it with today.
“We were well-resourced. Defra was also strategically funding local authorities with roll-out kerbside recycling schemes - millions were being poured in,” he said. “The communications campaign was devised to support it. And the primary objective, in which it was successful, of accelerating fairly low recycling rates up to the target levels had worked.
Taylor and Goodwin both said the industry needed to be clearer about where it wanted to be in 10 years’ time. “I really don’t think the benefits of recycling are properly sold. And I think we’ve got to get around this energy versus recycling debate,” said Taylor.
If a week is a long time in politics, 10 years is a lifetime for the waste industry.
One day in late September 2004, Covent Garden awoke to an unusual sight: Olympic rowing champion Matthew Pinsent CBE driving a giant motorised can.
I'd be interested to know what was discussed regarding textiles.
Hi Michael - thanks for the observation. We did not spend much time on individual materials: I think it could be a round table of its own! There are specific issues for all materials in turn and I imagine one of the current challenges around textile recycling is the fall in value in 2014.