Originally from Hull, the European Commision’s (EC’s) Member of the Cabinet of Janez Potocnik, William Neale, is a long way from Yorkshire. After having studied Economics and History (and then a Master’s in European Politics) at the University of Manchester and working for United Norwest Co-operatives, Neale moved to Belgium to work in management consultancy before joining the EC in 2000.

I originally came in to the Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry, working on the social economy and the Statute for a European Cooperative Society, so it was quite a good match. Then I worked more ‘horizontally’ on Coordination of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise policy in that department.”

In 2007, he was assigned to Janez Potocnik’s Cabinet for Science and Research and once Potocnik took over the environment portfolio in 2010, Neale went with him. He has been working to improve the European environmental landscape ever since. “As soon as we came into this portfolio, we identified our three main priorities: biodiversity, implementation of legislation and resource efficiency.

“We should not just take a legislative approach or an end-of-pipe approach to efficiency... but we need to have a narrative which says that being resource efficient is important for competitiveness and growth in the context of global constraints on resources.”

With the economic crisis plunging the EU further into debt, Neale recognises that the majority of the industrial growth is going to be in other parts of the world and in order to keep up, EC members and European businesses need to invest to see any pay-off. “Our import dependency means that we really have to see the writing on the wall and that we’re going to have to restructure... Or at least invest in ways which make us more efficient in terms of resources. “We believe [resource efficiency] is critical for competitiveness... so we put it firmly, fairly and squarely in the economic strategy.”

According to Neale, resource efficiency should be driven by companies, rather than governments or the EC. “We need to create more innovative, more resource efficient companies now, otherwise the transition will be more painful later on”, he says.

“The EC isn’t a command economy and we can’t really decide on prices – we can’t direct... it’s more about providing the framework conditions for business to help them with the transition and signal to them that they should innovate and invest in the right direction. So that can be through regulation, it can be through communication, it can be through funding, and so on.”

Though the EC cannot enforce taxes on a national level, Neale is keen to point out the role taxes can play in enabling behaviour change. “One of the areas where we can help fiscal consolidation is by reducing environmentally harmful subsidies (such as fossil fuels) in order to let new technologies get a firmer foothold. Also we can try to shift the focus of taxation, so for example switching from taxing labour to taxing pollution and resource use, etc.”

He explains that enabling consumers to have and understand market information, such as impacts over the cost of entire lifecycles, is crucial to growth. “You very often find that consumers will buy a cheap product but they’re not aware of the costs involved during the lifetime of the product. They also might not be aware of its recyclability and durability.”

It’s this disengaged attitude to products that the EC hopes to correct through policy that could drive a rise in green design: “We’re working now on environmental footprinting, and we’re working on lifecycle analysis and how we can apply that as an underlying methodology and tool for ecodesign and eco- labelling products as being ecodesigned. That way, we can knock the worst performing products off the market, if necessary, but also pull upwards the best performing ones”, says Neale.

One of the intrinsic difficulties with the European Union is that different countries have different approaches to and budgets for tackling resources and waste. The EC’s recently released ‘Screening Report’, ranking EU member states in a Olympic-style medals table sorted by best-worst waste management practices, outlined the huge range of responsibilities and actions that different states are taking (or not taking) when it comes to waste.

“Some of the most effective European schemes (in terms of waste management) are based on separate collection because it’s avoiding mixing the waste streams. From a resource efficiency perspective, I think it’s preferable if you can avoid having the waste streams being mixed up”, says Neale.

Interestingly, given the UK’s judicial review into the transposition of the EU’s revised Waste Framework Directive, Neale favours the use of separate kerbside collections for reducing the amount of waste to landfill and increasing resource efficiency.

“Landfill taxes are an effective means of doing it, but there are different other possibilities, such as separate kerbside collections, which are extremely important, and producer responsibility schemes which make those placing products on the market responsible for the separate collection, sorting and recycling of their products. And linked to that is creating markets for secondary raw materials so you get the demand pull. They’re very linked because if you collect separately obviously the materials are easier to process and the value of the materials becomes more instantaneous.”

When I ask him about his thoughts on the judicial review, Neale acknowledges that he is aware of the proceedings but hasn’t seen the redrafting. For him, the central problem is over getting good returns on investment and challenging prevailing views in the industry: “Co-mingling versus separate collection is an important issue but I think the problem there is often that people get locked into their capital investments. So, for example, because some countries have massively invested in incinerators, they’re locked into that way of doing things.

“Take the south of Italy, where they have huge stockpiles of waste which need to be dealt with. Though the easiest solution might be to build some incinerators to burn it, it’s not optimal as it would lock them into that solution for the foreseeable future and the value of that energy in Italy might be less than it would be, say, in Scandinavia, where it would be a valuable source of heat.”

The concept of differing countries being better or worse suited to energy from waste is an interesting one. Indeed, Neale says that the EC accepts countries moving refuse across borders to be used in a better-suited country rather than run the risk of them entrenching themselves in an inappropriate technology: “There has to be a certain amount of acceptance of movement of waste for it to be dealt with in the most appropriate and efficient way... but I think that, really, waste should be dealt with as close as possible to where it’s generated, and in principle European waste legislation is pushing for self-sufficiency.”

He adds: “It’s very essential that each Member State has a solid waste management plan which goes as far as possible towards zero landfill, minimal [energy] recovery and maximum recycling, composting and waste reduction.”

Efficiency is not the only method by which Neale sees the waste industry decoupling resource use from growth; for him, recycling and reuse are equally as important. “We have to have a circular economy concept, so it’s highly important that we’re pumping back materials into the economy rather than burning or burying them.”

Pushing materials back into the market strikes Neale as not just good environmental sense, but good business practice. “Where there is a good waste stream coming in, there is the incentive to invest in the appropriate facilities. But we need, I think, to try and push that so that the technologies develop faster.”

As part of this push for development, the EC is now launching a Raw Materials Innovation Partnership in November, bringing together various stakeholders to try to deal with the problems facing the raw materials sector.

Aside from conserving raw materials, Neale also believes that to truly promote a circular economy, businesses and industry will need to look to leasing as well as selling products: “We need to have more leasing of products so that a company doesn’t just sell products with raw materials included, but it leases a product and then takes it back at the end of its life and reuses those materials.“In the end, if you can get people to borrow rather than buy, they won’t have the initial outlay and as the materials go back to the producer... it makes it cheaper.”

However, switching to a borrowing rather than a consuming mentality is easier said than done. “We’re used to behaving in certain ways and it’s very difficult to get out of a sort of default behaviour and wanting to own stuff is one of those things. So we need to look at behavioural economics, how we can incentivise better behaviour.”

Getting people to behave in a more conscientious way first requires making them aware of the impact of their consumption habits. One iron the EC has in the fire regarding resource education is a new project called Generation Awake. This awareness campaign is targeted towards young people and includes an interactive site where users can find out the environmental footprint of everyday objects and learn about how to behave in more environmentally-friendly ways.

"The idea of a linear economy where you dig stuff out of the ground, you make products, you use them and then
you chuck them away and they’re buried in the ground, is something which came from the industrial revolution... [and] is becoming increasingly unworkable”

Being green, Neale contests, is becoming more and more mainstream, and just makes good business sense. Let’s hope we listen.