What should we make of Nick Clegg’s announcement that the Lib Dems have pledged to increase the target for recycling household waste in England from 50% to 70%? Luke Prazsky, waste resource management specialist at Wardell Armstrong, argues that there might be better answers.
At first sight it might not seem like a bad idea. A 70% target in England for recycling or composting of household waste would bring England into line with Wales and Scotland. But the Welsh government has already committed a lot of money to the idea since introducing it through the Waste (Wales) Measure, which came into force in February 2011, and has so far achieved just 54.3% (2013/14). It’s hard to know whether that rate will increase further or suffer from the law of diminishing returns.
And is hitting the magic 70% target the best thing anyway we could be doing with our household waste, especially with the pressures on local authority budgets? Is it ultimately worth the cost and the effort?
Getting to 70% would seemingly maximise the recycling potential of the residual MSW stream in line with Waste Hierarchy. That would make the EC happy. But what happens if we don’t make the 70% target? Will that be viewed as a failure?
To get anywhere near 70% in England, the most obvious option is to increase the efforts to collect food waste separately. According to WRAP, UK households are still avoidably throwing away 4.2 million tonnes of food and drink annually. That’s the equivalent of six meals every week for the average UK household.
But I have yet to see a recycling scheme that maximises the potential of food waste. Participation rates in food recycling schemes are stubbornly low, as is the tonnage from the households that are willing to play. Householders are already bemused by recycling initiatives, and don’t appear to have the appetite to make the necessary effort. No amount of public engagement seems likely to convince them.
The cost of food waste collections could also become an uneconomical pressure on the public purse. With gate fees for organic waste composting or AD less than £40/tonne compared to £100/tonne for landfill and normally only a little less for EfW, the savings initially looks attractive. But add in the cost of household food caddies, specialist collection vehicles, fuel, labour and the financial model quickly starts to look shaky if the realised tonnages are below expectations. It’s then the local authorities’ budgets that are at risk of being wasted.
A further risk from chasing the 70% target is that encouraging householders to put as much as possible in their recycling bins increases contamination – the main bugbear of re-processors in markets riddled with instability. Too much contamination again increases the cost to local authorities, because waste already separated at the kerbside will need to go through double handling to be disposed of via EfW. Another waste of money.
Some argue that the proliferation of EfW across the UK presents a risk to high recycling rates. Conversely though, an increase in recycling would put at risk the effectiveness and viability of EfW plants already built and commissioned by reducing their feedstocks and changing the composition of the materials being sent for thermal treatment. This too could have unintended consequences.
Getting to 70% would seemingly maximise the recycling potential of the residual MSW stream in line with Waste Hierarchy. That would make the EC happy. But what happens if we don’t make the 70% target? Will that be viewed as a failure?
It seems to me that the better place to start would be to reduce the volume of waste that we produce in the first place – including that eye-watering figure of 4.2m tonnes of food and drink avoidably thrown away every year by UK households. Financial penalties on householders for not recycling will never have political or public support. But “pay as you throw” might just be the answer. Although it has its own challenges, it would encourage householders to shop more carefully, throw less food away, avoid heavy packaging, and put pressure on producers to do the same.
Combined with a focus on specific materials to recycle with less risk of contamination, this would be a better answer than a 70% target that’s set in stone. What we really need is less and less waste in the first place – and more and more recycling of the right material that has true realisable value.