David Palmer-Jones has been doing more interviews than usual recently. It reflects a shift in attitude, a desire to speak up about some of the problems facing UK Plc, problems that also trouble SITA UK, the organisation Palmer-Jones heads.

A spate of rejected planning applications has been costly, and Palmer-Jones is concerned that the UK won’t have the facilities in place to meet its evolving demand for waste management. “The drivers are in place”, he says, in particular the landfill tax, which is a blunt but effective instrument, “but there is no national, or even regional strategy [for developing infrastructure].”

The difficulty is getting plans approved. Although warm to the idea of localism, Palmer-Jones feels the approach needs refining: “I was with Defra the other day, asking them to tell us what they want – if you don’t want larger energy from waste (EfW), which has economies of scale, if you want smaller community-size facilities, then say that, but that doesn’t take away the issue of planning, it means there will be more plants!”

Recounting this conversation, he says: “You have to give us a clear steer of what you think you would like as politicians to have, and the waste and resource industry can cater for that, but constantly rejecting plans isn’t giving us the right signal.”

In Palmer-Jones’s opinion, we should just about hit our 2013 landfill targets, but he’s concerned about missing a longer-term opportunity: “I fear that people will turn to our industry and say, ‘What have you been doing?’”

It’s not just EfW that are not being approved, but also anaerobic digestion (AD) and composting facilities. “People don’t want it near to them, that’s the issue. Even though these facilities create five times as many jobs as landfill.”

More encouragement is required: “I’m a great believer of making sure that local authorities, local communities that are accepting these types of infrastructure are rewarded for that.”

However, on the recent fervour for incentives Palmer-Jones is much more reserved. Speaking in his Maidenhead office, he notes that many services, such as Warwick (which SITA manages), are achieving rates of more than 60 per cent without incentives. (Despite the acclaim, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead recycles around 37 per cent.)

After 21 years with the company, SITA’s chief is clear about the main ingredients for a good collection scheme. Firstly, he notes there is a clear correlation between capacity and recycling capture, but studiously says little about the frequency of collections and space limitations.

“Secondly, they have to be quite simplistic, they have to spend a lot of time communicating with the public about the scheme.

“I call it a third way – a good, efficient, commonsense scheme with the right volume with education… Incentives are good for some people, but I can show you a third way”, he claims.

Councils face pressure to reduce costs and Palmer-Jones sees no reason that waste management services should be any different. However, he cautions against targeting provision for educating the public: “It’s a worry if potentially the cuts start to impact on the continued education of the public. In terms of recycling it’s absolutely essential that you continue to have constant feedback to the public in terms of their success and areas where we could improve.

“I think the municipal sector needs to continue to have good communication, active communication with their customers, with the public, and specifically – if I could choose – with children, because my greatest hope is with children.”

From 2003-06, Palmer-Jones was CEO of SITA in Sweden, a country considered well ahead of the UK when it comes to waste management. One major reason for this is attitude. Palmer-Jones recounts an instance of watching a children’s television programme to help his understanding of the language: “I was amazed that they had a competition which was related to recycling. And these kids had a better knowledge than I had in terms of what the products were. They could name every different form of plastic and they knew exactly what it became.”

He notes that it could take decades to engender a similar mindset here, but feels more needs to be done as part of a long-term vision of sustainability. A member of WRAP’s board, Palmer-Jones claims the organisation is making a valuable contribution to behavioural change: “WRAP can help us bring best practice. I think they can play a role to show there are other methods than just leaflets to do it.”

Yet, there are other reasons why Sweden is ahead of the UK – crucially, tapping North Sea oil limited the impact of OPEC engineered price shocks in the 1970s. This, he contends, switched our Scandinavian neighbours onto the role for energy from waste. Now, as energy security and fuel cost become bigger issues here, Palmer-Jones believes that we need to see things differently: “Why not for the next 20 years take the energy [from waste]? By that time I believe society hopefully would have caught up and we will have made a transformation into being much more resource orientated.”

He is concerned parochial debates are at times getting in the way: “The main thing is… to reduce the 50 million tonnes [the UK sends to landfill]… but we have to be careful not to get dragged into missing what we are trying to achieve. When we start saying, ‘I like weekly, two weekly; I like commingled, I don’t like commingled’ the whole of the industry polarises itself and ignores the big picture.”

In keeping with this stance, when it comes to how we should collect materials, it’s the end result that counts. “I think we sometimes get things back to front in the UK… I’m a great believer in trying to take contamination out of streams and if you do that the rest of the materials generally become much more easy to recycle. So what’s the main contaminant in municipal waste? It’s food waste.

“So what we’ve done is concentrated on the back end, dry recyclate, rather than concentrate on food waste. It’s nice to see there’s a growing recognition that food waste is important – maybe they’re seeing it in a slightly different version than I do – but I’m seeing it as an extraction of contamination. If you take that out, tremendous, because what that means is the rest of the material is cleansed, or partially cleansed, which makes any other recycling, whether it’s source separated or commingled, a lot easier to do.”

Although supportive of the role for the separate collection of kitchen and green waste, Palmer-Jones again feels that planning and siting AD plants, like most types of waste infrastructure, continues to be an issue. He notes that as agriculture produces about 90 million tonnes of biowaste, while the combined municipal and commercial sector results in only six to eight million tonnes, the logical answer that should mitigate public concerns is to put these on farms.

It’s another example of how he’s keen to overcome the obstacles that the UK currently faces. The waste and resources industry differs from most because everyone is directly connected to it. “Every time I go out to dinner, it’s amazing the discussion that results when you say you work in this area”, he reflects. “Everybody has an opinion about our business, which is good in some ways because perhaps we can channel some of that enthusiasm the right way, but in other ways it tends to polarise debate too low down, in my opinion.

“When we say we are squandering 50 million tonnes of resources, then it’s very difficult for people to understand how to tackle that, and hence I think there’s a propensity for all levels, politically and the man on the Clapham omnibus, to go back down to the level that they understand. So I think there’s a major issue for the industry and politicians to really lift the debate to an area where we can start to make a bit more strategic decisions about the future of these resources.”

So what direction does David Palmer-Jones think we need to move in? “We’ve got a real opportunity here to do something really positive. Sometimes people don’t see us as environmentalists, yet strangely we have a great belief in the environment, so I would have to try and get that matched up and start in the here and now, but don’t forget the long-term either… we’ve got a long journey to take in terms of behavioural change and designing out waste from our system.”