For someone whose role has a focus on mitigating climate change, to start out by studying fuels and combustion seems, superficially at least, something of a contradiction, I say to Marcus Gover, WRAP’s Director of Closed Loop Economy.

“Actually at one stage I even went to Japan, to teach Toyota about engines which was actually quite a thing in those days”, recalls Gover, sounding surprised it happened and somewhat nostalgic about being in a lecture room overlooking Mount Fuji.

Indeed, he appears to have had a thing for the Far East. After obtaining a PhD from Imperial College, Gover had lengthy spells working in Asia for clients including the European Commission and the World Bank. Eventually returning to manage a water engineering company, he then went onto a role as commercial director for a renewable energy company. If you were to sum up the focus of his varied work over 30, it would probably be resource efficiency.

“I’d always been interested in WRAP and waste”, he says, taking time away from this year’s CIWM conference to talk to Resource. Joining WRAP in 2007, Gover started by looking after the construction and manufacturing programmes. These, he notes, have already had success – for instance, in the case of the former, agreeing a voluntary commitment to halve waste going to landfill. The key, it seems, is getting companies to understand the link between commercial and environmental interests.

“Originally, people didn’t appreciate the value or cost of waste”, Gover explains. “I remember working with one company who worked out that the cost of their waste came to 10 per cent of their turnover. The same as their profit! That was when it suddenly clicked for them... Waste is not just the thing leftover that you throw away, it’s absolutely critical to your business.”

It’s now hard to imagine a waste industry without WRAP, which is funded by all four governments across the UK and the EU. In just over a decade, WRAP has spearheaded initiatives and investments to drive the UK forward.

“I think the whole circular economy concept is what WRAP is really about”, says the organisation’s Director of Closed Loop Economy. “The other thing, which I guess goes with that is the partnership; you can’t have a circular economy without partnership.”

It’s an overarching theme Gover returns to frequently during the interview. He adds: “One of the things I’m very keen on is how we build the partnerships within different parts of the chain between retailers, local authorities, waste management companies and the reprocessors and it doesn’t always appear that there is harmony in all these places, but I do think it is growing.”

Inevitably, focus has changed since the organisation’s inception in 2000, from developing markets for specific materials, to a wider palette, moving up the waste hierarchy and inspiring resource-efficient behaviour. Gover is quick to highlight the type of environmental benefit connected to this: “If you send a tonne of food waste to anaerobic digestion (AD) you’re going to save around half a tonne of CO2 equivalent, but if you prevent the food waste in the first place you are saving over four tonnes of CO2 equivalent.”

Not that he’s doing down AD – he’s highlighting the contribution that reducing or avoidance can make, even if this can be difficult to understand. Yet, isn’t there a challenge getting an industry – largely paid according to the amount of material it handles – to embrace this? The financial returns for avoiding a tonne of waste aren’t always obvious, but Gover observes that quantifying waste reduction for consumers or businesses can help elevate the role of this over recycling. “It’s a hard concept to grasp because you can’t see it, can’t touch it. But if you set a baseline, and then measure the change from the baseline, you can realise just how much money you’re saving. For example, the average family household throws away around £680 worth of food. By looking at it in this way, you realise that what you are doing is throwing money away. You don’t want your council tax paying to take away something that you could just not waste it in the first place.”

Waste minimisation may well be the top priority for WRAP at the moment, but recovery is also an area it is hoping to improve. “We looked up [the hierarchy] to waste prevention and we also looked down to recovery as well. Our current vision of a world without waste is only achievable if you do all the waste prevention, all the reuse, all of the collective recycling and all of the recovery too.” Energy and material recovery and reuse are two areas that Gover talks passionately about, and are also the areas where he believes the most work needs to be done.

“We’ve got to recover what can’t be recycled and reuse what’s still in working order”, says Gover. “It’s about recovering the right wastes. Take biodegradable waste going to landfill, it’s going to break down to produce emissions which are quite significant for climate change. Recovering energy from that, by AD for example, would be a good thing to do. Then take something like plastic that doesn’t break down in landfill and does not give off methane. If you burn it in an incinerator then it does give off emissions and becomes a fossil fuel. Burning and recovering the right waste is important.”

To date, WRAP has done less on reuse, but is actively looking to change that. Again he offers the benefit in terms of avoided emissions. “Recycling textiles saves something like 2.7 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per tonne which is very high, nearly double that of plastic bottles in fact, but if you reuse it, it’s around 15 tonnes of CO2 per tonne, a huge difference in terms of the carbon saving.” He adds: “Reusing textiles is one of the areas we’re focusing on now, as well as electricals and furniture. We have launched a funding package of loans and grants to help smaller businesses put infrastructure in place to properly sort and separate these products for reuse.

“This year, working with the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan, we’re trying to see if we can increase the collection and reuse of clothing.” Clothing reuse is already doing pretty well; around 50 per cent of our clothing is reused through charity shops, retailers (such as M&S’s Shwopping campaign) and being sent abroad. “UK clothing is considered to be high quality and fashionable... the fashionable bit surprised me”, Gover laughs.

The emphasis on reuse is not just applicable to clothes, but most particularly applies to electricals, where over £220 million worth WEEE that could be reused is thrown away every year. “Electricals is an area that we’ve got more to do on, a lot more, and it’s particularly centred around getting the right infrastructure. We’ve got growing collections of small WEEE but what’s needed now is for WEEE to be collected not just for reprocessing where it tends to get smashed up for the plastic and metals, but also for reuse (if suitable), once having been repaired, checked and certified. The Resource Security Action Plan becomes very important here, as all those rare earths, gold and so on that are in WEEE aren’t captured in the current system for collecting and recycling, so there’s both an environmental and an economic business case.”

Another key strand of WRAP’s broad programme of work is supporting councils, an activity that now falls within Gover’s remit. Praising the progress councils have made to date, Gover notes there is still a lot more to be done. Particularly in terms of waste minimisation, something the local authority section of WRAP’s website is assisting.

When questioned about the connection between free garden waste collection services and higher waste arisings he smiles wryly, careful not to be drawn on the subject, other than to note it’s up to each council to decide what’s best. It’s a pragmatic answer, illustrating how WRAP noticeably steers clear of commentary on waste policy.

This is no surprise, the organisation is first and foremost a strategic delivery agent and this is evidenced by how it’s approached the issue of plastics recycling. On the face of it, the organisation’s initial encouragement for councils to collect mixed plastics seemed at odds with the infrastructure to handle this material. Gover’s response is to explain the overarching method WRAP applies to the questions it’s posed.

“There are three things to manage here: collections, reprocessing infrastructure and markets; for plastics recycling to grow they all have to work. Nobody will develop collections unless the reprocessing infrastructure is there, nobody will develop the infrastructure unless the market or the collections are there. Breaking the vicious circle is difficult and often the role of WRAP is to change the rules of recycling.”

This argument is applicable to one area of recycling that has been causing contention amongst the industry recently: plastic film. There are few councils that will recycle it, yet consumer demand for film/non-rigid plastic collection is high. Surprisingly, Gover tells us that WRAP is not promoting kerbside collection of this yet. “Our view at the moment is to keep it away, but we’ve been working with the retailers to set up collection points throughout their stores which collect film with the carrier bags. They then use the film to make refuse sacks and sustainable store hoardings which is nice for the customers to get the whole loop visualised.”

This exemplifies the current preoccupation for Gover, fostering partnerships to create a circular flow of materials – the ambition of zero waste closer to realisation.