These days the media is full of discussion about the industrial future of our country and our economy. We are continuously reminded that we need to reinvent ourselves in order to maintain our current and future standard of living, which is in danger of deterioration from the relocation of the manufacturing industry to the low-wage economies of the East and the decline of the city of London due to the global banking crisis.
Equally deserving of media attention, however, is the speed of depletion of mining resources in Africa, Latin America and Asia, which implies that in the next 20 years or so virgin metals will be in short supply and beyond our price reach. What’s more, to secure them, we’ll have to enter into the same kind of uncomfortable relationships with countries who own such materials as is currently the case with petroleum-owning states in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Some 200 million new middle-class citizens have been created in India and China in the last 30 years and the next 30 years will see the rise of middle classes in the resource-owning countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia. The proliferation of people with dispensable cash and the desire to consume partly explains the rapid depletion of virgin materials, and now, some resource economists project that there are not enough viable supplies of copper, zinc and bauxite to last beyond the next 20 years.
All of this goes to show that in the absence of virgin resources (or with limited access to them) secondary materials will become the major planetary resource. Whoever has amassed large quantities of secondary materials will be able to call the shots in the economy of the future.
As a country that pioneered the Industrial Revolution as well as the modern consumption life style (which generates secondary materials), the UK is in pole position to lead the coming secondary materials revolution.
Unfortunately, our secondary materials are being exported by waste merchants to the Far East at such an alarming rate – up to 80 per cent of materials – that any chance of being pioneers in this new revolution is being lost for future generations. This is partly because material collection has been handed over by short-sighted local authorities to waste management companies whose main aim is to make the maximum profit for their shareholders, who, in many cases are based abroad. Veolia, for example, operates in 100 local authorities in the UK and, as a global company operating in some 60 countries, is not shy to export materials abroad. This is another example of how short-term benefits can get in the way of long-term survival. For the UK to succeed in this new revolution we have to limit the export of secondary materials – including industrial waste and redundant machinery – as working against the national interest.
What is urgently needed in the UK is a deliberate and planned expansion of local processing facilities for metals, such as aluminium, steel, tins, copper and plastics and a government policy that treats the export of secondary materials as no different from landfill activities. The landfill tax failed to live up to its promise and has led to the unwanted side effect of encouraging the rise in exports. It is time to close this loophole and save our future by tackling difficult issues and vested interests.
It would be nice if, in the process, the government could encourage local communities to engage in local collection, bulking, sorting and baling of secondary materials that could be shipped directly to UK reprocessors, resulting in a new industrial revolution and safeguarding employment for future generations. Unfortunately, UK governments of the last 15 years have presided over the elimination of forward-thinking community recycling groups from the realm of secondary materials collection, by handing collection contracts to global companies with no vested interest in UK industrial strategy. The sector needs urgent leadership and the verdict on our governments must be that they have gone AWOL on this cardinal issue and now have a great deal of work to be done.