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Urban waste management conference
Siting next generation composting and recycling plants: Why we need a more responsive planning system
Andrew Ainsworth, Environmental Services Association
25 November 2002
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for the kind invitation to address this conference.
ESA is the sectoral trade association representing the interests of the companies providing waste and secondary resources management services to the private and public sectors in the UK. With a turnover of around 5 billion pounds annually our sector makes a significant contribution to the UK's move towards a more environmental and economically sustainable future.
Our industry will be a vital partner for both central and local government in delivering the UK's domestic and international targets on waste and recycling.
Today's event is timely as we await the imminent publication of the Strategy Unit's examination of the framework necessary to deliver the aspirations of Waste Strategy 2000. It is apparent to everyone here today that the national waste strategy has for a long time needed a fillip to enable its delivery, and we hope that the report, and other anticipated announcements in the Pre-Budget report on Wednesday, will provide this impetus.
ESA welcomed the announcement of the study by the Secretary of State, the Rt. Hon. Margaret Beckett MP, just over a year ago. We have been involved directly in the Secretary of State's advisory board, consistently providing information to the Strategy Unit, and our Members have been key contributors to the work of the Strategy Unit. We keenly await the report's findings.
At the third ESTET National Consensus Conference in September, the Secretary of State outlined the key challenges facing the Government to achieve a more co-ordinated approach to managing waste in order to achieve higher levels of environmental and economic sustainability.
She also emphasised the need for partnership with the regulated industry ESA represents, alongside the various other stakeholders involved in delivering compliance with the UK's national and international obligations.
As ever, the European Union remains the primary driver for increasing resource efficiency in the UK economy. This is primarily being achieved through the introduction of new and ever more complex producer responsibility legislation and the requirements of the Landfill Directive.
The Landfill Directive requires substantial diversion of the biodegradable component of the municipal waste stream away from landfill. Although these are national targets for the UK as a whole, the focus will be on local delivery by local authorities.
This was recently confirmed with the announcement in the Queen's speech of the new Waste and Emissions Trading Bill, which will establish the trading scheme for landfill permits allowing local authorities to take a flexible, market-based approach to diverting biodegradable waste away from landfill.
The ongoing revision of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive will mean more packaging will have to be extracted from the municipal waste stream to enable the UK to meet the increased recycling and recovery targets.
The recently agreed Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive will pose a further challenge for local authorities.
Furthermore, the European Commission has signalled its intention to address patterns of resource production and consumption and waste recycling more broadly through the development of Thematic Strategies on the Sustainable use of Resources and Waste Recycling as part of the Sixth Environmental Action Programme.At the domestic level, the Government has set local authorities statutory targets for the recycling of household waste, and Waste Strategy 2000 sets further targets for the recovery and recycling of municipal waste.
This short précis demonstrates that the pressures on local authorities and ESA's Members to deliver greater recycling and recovery of resources from the municipal waste stream are manifold.
If the UK is to meet its many obligations, there must be a strategic framework for waste management within which local authorities and the private sector are enabled to establish the systems that will deliver what the Government wants.
This will include addressing the regulatory, fiscal and other mechanisms that must be put in place and co-ordinated to ensure that the UK as a whole can deliver what is expected of it.
ESA has consistently advised central government that Waste Strategy 2000 failed to put in place the necessary framework to enable the delivery of its own targets and, therefore, compliance with EU law.
Regulation remains the primary driver for our industry, and for more sustainable waste management in general.
It is essential that we have clear and unambiguous standards, with precise implementation dates. Without the certainty that waste will need to be treated to a certain standard at a certain time, industry will not be willing to invest in the infrastructure required to treat that waste.
Industry also needs to be confident that the regulations will be applied consistently, and that they will be enforced fairly and evenly, proportionately and transparently.
Although regulation remains the primary driver, ESA's Members must also be enabled by a strategic framework for waste management that also encompasses planning and funding.
And this is key: The UK will not deliver the infrastructure to manage municipal waste without the necessary funding, and the planning system must be responsive enough to deliver the infrastructure necessary to meet national and international targets.
ESA's Members, in partnership with local authorities, are making the investments in recycling and recovery infrastructure, in order to deliver compliance with the Landfill Directive and to help meet the statutory recycling targets. And they are willing to invest even more to realise the goals that the UK must meet over the next two decades.
The scale of the challenge is huge. The European Environment Agency has recently estimated that to deliver the biodegradable municipal waste diversion targets of the Landfill Directive alone, the UK, as a whole, must divert over 26 million tonnes of BMW per year from landfill by 2016 (or 2020 if the UK uses the derogation period) to meet the final 65% reduction target.
Much of this diversion will be achieved by returning to land those biodegradable materials that can be composted. This is entirely consistent with the Best Practical Environmental Option where it can be demonstrated that returning those composted materials to land is justifiable from an environmental point of view.
The Government's recently published proposals to amend the Animal By-Products Order to permit again the composting of household kitchen waste and other catering wastes containing animal by-products, must be welcomed as the removal of a significant barrier to increasing the recovery and recycling of the biodegradable fraction of the municipal waste stream.
However, in the experience of ESA's Members, composting plants are as likely to be refused planning permission as an energy from waste facility. And while composting will not deal with all of the projected 20-30 million tonnes of BMW arising in 15-20 years time, a substantial amount of new composting capacity will have to be developed over the next few years in order to ensure the UK is moving towards compliance with the Landfill Directive.
Meeting the Waste Strategy 2000 targets, and the targets set by the waste strategies of the devolved administrations will require an even greater effort to reduce the UK's reliance on landfill.
A simple calculation that I made over the weekend, reveals that if current increases in waste arisings continue at an average of 3% per annum until 2015, there will be a requirement to extract value from around 34 million tonnes of municipal waste each year if we are to meet the 2015 67% recovery target set by Waste Strategy 2000.
Even if the average annual increase in waste arisings is only 1%, this will still leave a requirement to divert 27 million tonnes of municipal waste from landfill every year by 2015.
On current progress and based on current rates of waste growth, ESA has estimated that the UK will fail to meet the 2015 40% recycling target by over 3 million tonnes and the 2015 67% recovery target by an even greater amount.
The scale of the challenge has been outlined. The demand for new waste recycling and recovery infrastructure is enormous. The scale of the challenge represents more than a step change. It requires a giant leap that will have to be achieved using a number of smaller, but not insignificant steps.
I would suggest that one of the most important steps in this process is ensuring that the management of the municipal waste stream is fully funded, in the context of delivering our national and international obligations.
As you will already know, the current cost of managing the municipal waste stream is less than £1 per household per week, and it is generally accepted that there is an urgent need at least to double this figure if the UK is to meet its domestic and international obligations on waste and recycling.
However, a survey published by MORI in August 2002, which was commissioned by the Environmental Services Training and Education Trust (ESTET), showed that most people think that the average household already pays more than double this amount, and that 28% - nearly a third of the people surveyed - think each household spends more than £5 per week on the collection and management of household waste.
Clearly, most people think they are paying much more than they are, and many people think they are already paying more than local authorities and ESA's Members actually need.
Furthermore, in the same survey 61% - nearly two out of every three people - placed the collection, recycling and management of waste as the most valued service provided by their local authorities.
Regardless of where people live in Great Britain, regardless of their gender, age or social group, a clear majority rank the services provided increasingly by ESA's Members in partnership with local authorities to be the most important service they receive from local government.
Unlike householders as waste producers, the business sector has a direct relationship with its waste manager, ensuring that the management of commercial and industrial waste is carried out according to the polluter pays principle.
The task ahead of local authorities is made significantly more difficult by the fact that the same level of price transparency does not exist with the householder, as they are broadly immune from the producer pays principle.
Earlier this year, ESTET also commissioned Ernst & Young to produce a preliminary discussion document to explore the application of the producer pays principle to householders.
Ernst & Young were particularly asked to consider non-regressive models and to take fully into account the current structure of local government and of local authorities' contracts with ESA's Members. Ernst & Young were also asked to consider the experience of the water sector, where a direct relationship between householders and the service provider already exists.
Ernst & Young's paper is a public document, available on ESA's web site, and openly discusses a range of options.
Given the confusion of debate, one of its useful outputs is perhaps to draw a clear distinction between direct charging, which is a flat fee local authorities could collect from Council Tax payers on behalf of ESA's Members, and variable charging which requires householders to pay more if they generate more waste.
Direct charging need not jeopardise social justice or remove local authorities' control over local standards of waste management, but importantly it can remove all or some management of the municipal waste stream from the public accounts.
Variable charging is obviously the purer application of the producer pays principle, and it may be the long term solution for the UK and in some parts of the Country some of ESA's Members could operate variable charging relatively soon.
However, given uncertainties in the longer term evolution of the European Union's environmental policy in the Sixth and Environmental Action Programme and given hugely divergent recycling rates across the UK, direct charging might be a more pragmatic and viable initial step towards enabling local authorities to arrange, on a basis which cost-effectively manages credit risk, for ESA's Members to provide a higher level of service to householders.
ESA has for some time advocated piloting of direct charging in the current Parliament and we hope this will be one feature of "life after the Strategy Unit".
Paying for waste will help to underpin the investment in new facilities that our industry wants to make.
It will also facilitate the development of a direct relationship between the householder as the producer of waste and their responsibility for managing waste. In this way, the householders' awareness of waste will be raised.
This is another essential step in the process of managing waste more sustainably. If we are to achieve greater separation of materials for recycling and recovery, the householder will be the essential first step in the process of recycling.
Nowhere is this challenge greater than in our urban areas, where population densities are at their highest, and other social challenges are most acute.
The challenge in these environments will necessitate the implementation of flexible solutions that best suit the particular circumstances. Facilities for separation and subsequent recycling of waste must be accessible and easy to use.
It is a fact of life that despite the results of the MORI survey which identified its importance as a service, waste management comes quite a long way down most people's list of priorities when it comes to action.
It is well known that in middle class suburban areas high recycling rates can be achieved underpinned by relatively high levels of participation, but the same cannot be expected from areas in the inner cities and other locations with high levels of deprivation.
It is possible to include facilities in new housing developments to allow people to separate their waste into the recyclable and non-recyclable fractions.
The pressure to develop new housing is immense. The latest figures from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's web site indicate that there will be an extra 2.5 million more individual households in England alone by 2021.
This is being driven mainly by a reduction in the number of people per household, which is projected to continue.
This demographic trend is also one of the main reasons for the observed increases in waste arisings in recent years, and why waste arisings are likely to continue to increase into the future.
For example, a single person, living alone, generates 11 kg of rubbish per week;
Two people living together generate 7 kg each per week; and
3 or more people living together generate only 4 kg each per week.
Co-habitees tend to share everything from the washing machine to the Sunday paper.
Incidentally, I would like to thank INCPEN (the Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment) for these figures.
This could be compensated for if new housing is focussed on continental-style apartments with shared facilities. Furthermore, new housing of this type could be designed to facilitate the separation of recyclable materials.
It appears to be a slightly simplistic message, but communal living reduces waste!
However, developers of new housing must be persuaded to incorporate these features. They will not out of the kindness of their hearts include these facilities into new housing if there is no incentive or obligation to do so.
And not all new housing will be along the more communal style of living.
Furthermore, the majority of the UK's housing is existing housing, and as I said earlier on, there must be flexibility in the systems that local authorities and ESA's Members put in place to meet the UK's national and international obligations.
This will require co-ordination.
It will require funding to ensure we meet the changes legislation prescribes.
It will necessitate a planning system that is responsive to the changes we need to make.
It will require political will, and I hope that the anticipated announcements and the publication of the Strategy Unit's report on Wednesday will prove to be the impetus to achieve this. 
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