Some people know exactly what they want to be when they grow up and have a specific career in mind from an early age, but most take rather more convoluted routes to where they ultimately end up. This is certainly the case with waste campaigner Michael Warhurst – now Senior Campaigner for Economics and Resource Use at Friends of the Earth, who started off his early life working on chemicals policy. Despite this change of focus, his involvement in Friends of the Earth (FoE) has remained a constant fixture for the majority of his life.

Warhurst first got involved in FoE when he was just a teenager, campaigning with his parents to stop the East London River Crossing and taking the ‘Earth matters’ mantra to heart. Following this he joined various local groups and was on the Board of FoE Scotland while at university.

In 1997, having completed a PhD in Biochemistry, and an MSc in Environmental Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, he joined the FoE Industry & Pollution Team. “I was initially focusing a lot on factory pollution, but I then moved on to chemicals and quite rapidly up to EU level, because I soon realised that that is actually where the power is”, he recalls.

In subsequent years, chemicals policy took him around the world, from working for the WWF in Brussels on reforming EU chemicals legislation, to the Lowell Centre for Sustainable Production in the US. But then he decided it was time to move on to a new challenge, and his old team at FoE had evolved into the Reduce Resource Use Team, Warhurst returned home and rejoined them as Senior Campaigner in 2005. And so his career path switched from chemicals to waste.

“Resource use had always been an interest, because in the mid ’90s Friends of the Earth were engaged in The Sustainable Europe Project. The project involved groups across Europe, and looked at different resources, to see how much is available sustainably in the world and how much we would each have if we distributed it equally. It was quite an inspiring project”, says Warhurst.

It was in this new team that Warhurst formed the views on waste that he carries today, and that have led to his dismay at the current state of play within government and industry: “We decided to focus on the idea of phasing out residual waste. When trying to be resource efficient, this is really what you need. And so we very much focused on the resources aspect.

“It’s really a long, slow process, trying to move from the idea that waste is something to be got rid of to the idea that waste is something that you actually need to get the resources out of again, and away from the idea that landfills are bad so we need to send waste to incinerators instead, and maybe we can make a bit of energy while we do it. The problem with incinerators is that they waste resources and create a big demand for material.”

In his latest position, Warhurst also played a central role in enshrining the 50 per cent recycling target (by 2020) in EU law, the rate that will be one of the main drivers for UK waste policy in the coming years: “We ran around the European Parliament persuading individual members, as well as those that could influence others. The parliament then got hold of the idea and managed to get it through to the member states.”

And it’s a good job they succeeded. Looking back, Warhurst sees the enforcement of this particular target as imperative, what with the current government’s lacklustre approach to reducing waste: “I think what has been shown since is the importance of setting targets; it’s meant that the UK coalition government had to keep that target for recycling. I think if it hadn’t existed there is a good chance that there wouldn’t be any recycling target in England now.

“Labour had eventually got around to doing quite a lot on waste, and there had been a big increase in recycling. Then the coalition government came in and killed that off, then there was a backlash from industry and ultimately government put in packaging recycling targets. But it was very much against their will.”

Speaking of Eric Pickles, Warhurst also believes that his underlying motive in pushing for weekly bin collections, and in portraying councils as the ‘Bin Police’, was to attack local government: “In most areas, the central government tends to tell local government what to do, and waste is the one area where local government is largely allowed to do what it likes.”

Whether environmental activists will succeed in bringing this government around to a sensible stance on the environment remains to be seen, but Warhurst is used to showing politicians better ways of doing things. When he rejoined FoE, for instance, the EU was using a misguided method for measuring resource use: “When I started, the thematic strategy on natural resources at EU level was very much focused around the need to reduce, and therefore measure, the environmental impacts of resource use. Whereas from our point of view at that time we were much more interested in reducing the actual amount of resource use. The only real method of measuring resource use was in simple tonnes of material. I identified that the key thing behind everything was to make sure that we had a clear way of measuring resource use, because that’s what we have on climate, and that’s why climate is so far ahead.”

And so the four key indicators for measuring resource use were identified: overall material use, carbon footprint, water footprint and land footprint. “The resource efficiency footprint approach seems to be widely accepted now, and the challenge is starting to be making sure you’ve really got the data, so that is where we are now. I don’t think you can solve everything with a simple set of indicators, but it certainly gives you an idea.”

Another major success has been to get the European Commission (EC) to really recognise and start enforcing the waste hierarchy: “What we’re finally seeing now is that when countries go to get funds for new incinerators, the relevant Directorate-General in the EC is actually saying no.” What’s more, Warhurst observes that many countries now understand that they have too much incineration capacity, that they are so “desperate for waste” that the UK has begun to export ours to meet their demands.

In light of this shifting debate on incineration, Warhurst struggles to understand the rationale of certain factions in, say, the plastics industry, who still encourage burning plastic waste, “even though landfilling plastic is actually one of the few methods of carbon capture and storage that does work”. He adds: “Why do they advocate incineration? Well, because they don’t have to do anything. There is no such thing as designing plastic materials for incineration; you just burn them. So, if the plastic industry were going to advocate recycling and reuse, then they would actually have to do something in terms of redesign.

“The classic big company essentially wants to build big bits of kit on long contracts, and that’s what a lot of waste management still is. There’s still this big push for incinerators. In some regions we can see very clearly that recycling is being squeezed by incineration; the councils with the biggest incinerator contracts are not going to be trying to beat recycling targets, when so many of them have contracts which require delivery of certain amounts of waste.”

Looking to the future and that looming 2020 deadline, Warhurst believes that a residual waste tax is needed, as well as a tax for incineration. Whilst he recognises that the landfill tax has been important in creating a sense of clarity that landfilling will get much more expensive, he also views it as “a blunt instrument which has had some perverse outcomes”.

“The more logical thing from the EU would be to set residual waste targets, and then it would be up to the member states to work out how to achieve them. The Landfill Directive doesn’t say anything about landfilling metals or plastics, only biodegradable waste. And I think it is clear in the last 10 or 15 years that the terms of the debate on waste have changed; it is much more resource focused now, and I think that logically should change a lot of the measures being talked about.”

Indeed, Warhurst says that government and industry have a lot to do to tackle levels of residual waste, to meet the EU targets he campaigned for: “We have a situation where there is an acceptance about recycling, but more needs to be done. I think that a large part of government and industry is still planning for quite a lot of residual waste, and that’s just not a good idea. We should be focusing more on trying to address why things aren’t getting recycled or reused, and ultimately I think the important fight in the next few years will probably end up being around the next EU recycling targets.”

But it’s not only a fight around recycling targets that Warhurst is preparing for. As ever, he’s got his eye on the bigger picture and realises that as we try to reduce our resource use, we’ve also got to improve our wellbeing – and win arguments with the general public as well as the politicians: “We’ve got to actually work to try and improve people’s quality of life while we’re reducing resource use, so it is something that people want to do rather than something that people end up being forced to do because the price of resources have gone very high or the climate impacts are becoming too severe.”