As a United Kingdom, we’re getting good at recycling. But, according to the Local Government Association (LGA), the UK still dumps more household waste than any other European Union country and will reach the landfill limit in 2018 unless the amount of waste we produce is reduced. It is surprising then, that despite being at the very top of the waste hierarchy triangle, waste prevention and waste minimisation are not given as much time, consideration and financial support as recycling.

Waste prevention, as defined in the Waste Framework Directive (WFD), reduces: the quantity of waste, including through the reuse of products or the extension of the lifespan of products; the adverse impacts of the generated waste on the environment and human health; or the content of harmful substances in materials and products. It is perhaps the hardest waste activity to achieve, as it often requires a change in attitude and behaviour. Made up of three levels: strict avoidance; reduction at source; and reuse, waste prevention differs from other types of waste management in that it occurs before material ever becomes waste.

Despite not receiving much attention until recently, waste prevention has been part of the WFD since 1975. The directive has been updated several times since then, most recently in 2008 when the EC decided it needed to ‘clarify key concepts’ including how to ‘strengthen the measures that must be taken in regard to waste prevention’, and ensuring that the waste industry ‘takes into account the whole life-cycle of products and materials and not only the waste phase’.

The resulting revised Waste Framework Directive (rWFD), champions waste prevention, saying that it ‘should be the first priority of waste management’. Further, in Article 29 (3) of the rWFD, the directive states that in order to increase waste prevention, all member states have to ‘develop National Waste Prevention Programmes (NWPPs) concentrating on the key environmental impacts and taking into account the whole life-cycle of products and materials’, by 12 December 2013.

The EC’s handbook on NWPPs states however that the ‘planning and the decision’ of the programme have to be finalised at this date, but not the ‘implementation and evaluation’. According to the handbook, the purpose of the NWPPs is to ‘move member states broadly towards the longterm goal of phasing out waste’ and states that the ‘stabilisation of waste generation’ is a key preliminary aim, followed by targets for ‘absolute reductions over five to twenty years’. All NWPPs will also need to be reviewed and revised at least every six years and will have to take into account the EC’s own waste prevention and decoupling objectives, which will be released by the end of 2014.

One of the main questions regarding these targets is whether they will be quantitative, qualitative or a mixture of the two. There is currently no common set of tools or indicators for waste prevention that have been widely accepted, making setting targets frustratingly difficult. Reducing the hazardous content of a product can markedly reduce the environmental damage caused at the end of life, but doesn’t affect the total volume of waste sent to landfill at the product’s end-of-life – measuring the waste prevention would in this instance be qualitative, and would be more beneficial to the environment than merely reducing the amount of waste produced. This uncertainty over widely accepted evaluation indicators appears to be the main reason why many member states, including England, have not yet implemented an NWPP, despite having had over five years to do so. For how can you implement rules and targets on something when there is nothing there to measure?

“High-level ideas about national performance of waste prevention are very much more difficult to substantiate than, for example, material recovery into recycling. There aren’t any easy frames of reference with waste prevention”, says Julian Parfitt, Principal Resource Analyst at waste consultants, Oakdene Hollins. “Reducing the amount of waste is good, but it’s wrong to quantify waste prevention just through the amount of waste arising, as that doesn’t take into account the overall resource efficiencies... It’s very, very difficult to build the high-level picture of waste prevention and minimisation because it’s so much more context specific, it’s so much more qualitative.”

One method of quantifying waste prevention that is frequently used deals with the amount of carbon dioxide avoided. WRAP’s Love Food Hate Waste (LFHW) initiative is just one project that has quantified waste prevention in this way. “When it comes to food, the waste from our homes is responsible for the equivalent of 17 million tonnes of CO2 each year. If we didn’t waste this good food and drink it would have the same environmental impact as taking one in four cars off UK roads”, says Richard Swannell, Director of Design and Waste Prevention at WRAP. Indeed, WRAP estimates that sending one tonne of food waste to anaerobic digestion (AD) saves between half a tonne and one tonne of CO2 equivalent, but preventing it in the first place saves over four and half tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

The problem with trying to quantify waste in the amount of carbon avoided is that it’s always going to be an estimate, says Parfitt. “This comparison of half a tonne saved through a good end-of-pipe solution but four or five times that for preventing it sounds like a neat statistic, but when you think what it really means, it means having a finger on all the supply chain stages and all their current carbon impacts which really isn’t very easy to do... Measuring waste prevention in carbon tonnage turns its back on the point of waste prevention... which is really talking about overall improvements in resource efficiency.”

Indeed, the supply chain issue makes not just measuring waste prevention, but the very act of preventing waste very difficult, according to Parfitt: “So much production has shifted to the Far East... How can we claim that falling quantities of waste equals good environmental outcome and successful product of waste prevention strategies? We can’t. We have to admit the fact that though we might want to look at waste and resource issues within national boundaries, it’s increasingly less relevant given globalisation.”

For consumers at least, the easiest way of quantifying waste prevention is by looking at the potential cost savings waste prevention and waste minimisation can have. By providing tips for reducing waste and calculating the amount of money lost due to food waste, LFHW is helping to create a more conscientious society. According to Swanell: “A large part of [food waste prevention] is about buying only what we need (through planning meals for the week ahead, writing and sticking to a shopping list in store), and through cooking the right amounts. Also, by following date labels, storage and freezer guidance, consumers can make the most of their food and help the environment at the same time.

“It isn’t necessarily about buying less, but making better use of what we have bought. There is a strong financial and environmental case to make full use of what we buy. For example, reducing avoidable food waste saves the average family £50 per month – equivalent to the cost of a utility bill.” It is this tangible figure that makes consumers more likely to take action over their waste-creating habits, says Swannell. “Household waste has declined by 2.4 million tonnes over the last 2-3 years and food waste (collected by local authorities) accounts for about half of that reduction. So there is evidence that waste prevention activity is having an impact and it is saving us money”, he adds.

The LFHW campaign is just one of several projects that have been making in-roads in waste prevention. “There has been significant progress made in this area, particularly for food waste and packaging as demonstrated by the Courtauld Commitment, Courtauld Commitment Phase 2 and the Home Improvement Sector Commitment. But that is not to say there isn’t more to do, as there is... There are six key actions that businesses can do to prevent waste: design products using less hazardous materials; manufacture products with less materials/lightweighting; lease rather than sell products; use a product for its entire life; and reuse or repair products”, Swannell tells me (see WRAP's waste prevention wheel above). Reuse is one area that WRAP will be doing extensive work on in the coming months, with plans to launch a reuse standard for the UK by 2013. WRAP will also be consulting with Defra on an NWPP for England. Just when this will happen though, is a little more vague.

When I contact Defra, a spokesperson tells me that though waste prevention activities in England have already been established, an NWPP has not yet been agreed. “There has already been significant amounts of activity on waste prevention in England. For example, on food waste, the government provides advice to consumers through WRAP’s ‘Love Food Hate Waste’ campaign and works with the industry to improve products and practices through the Courtauld Commitment. We are also focusing on the redistribution of edible food to the voluntary sector and have invited supermarkets, FareShare and FoodCycle to a roundtable to discuss making progress on national systems to do this.

“It’s too early to say what the NWPP will look like as we haven’t yet agreed a way forward. But we’ll be focusing in on making sure businesses have better resource efficiency and use less hazardous materials in their products, and we’ll also be working on programmes that make it easier for the public to reuse items they no longer want through better access to reuse services. We’ll also want to make sure that products are designed to last for longer.” With just over a year left until the EC’s NWPP deadline, Defra has a lot of work to do in a relatively short period of time, but it has said that when it does start considering an NWPP for England, it will look to waste prevention activities undertaken by other member states.

One member state that Defra could look to for inspiration is Ireland. Having had an NWPP in place since 2004, Ireland is well versed in waste prevention and is cited in the EC’s Guidelines on Waste Prevention Programmes as exemplary of best practice. What makes the programme so successful, claims the EPA (the body responsible for the NWPP), is the fact that it subsumes and builds on already existing waste prevention programmes, such as: the Local Authority Prevention Demonstration Network; the Green Business Initiative; the Green Hospitality Awards; and the Green Home Programme, amongst others.

“It’s good to have an NWPP that integrates as much as possible with all the other activities that are going on... You can’t have a big parachute NWPP programme coming in replacing everything and ignoring what has happened to date – you need to work on what’s already there”, Dr Gerry Byrne, Ireland’s EPA Programme Manager, tells me. “The NWPP should build on existing sustainable behaviour initiatives, be they centred around reuse, recycling or climate change.”

Seeing behaviour change is one of the hardest aspects of promoting a waste-preventing society, Byrne says. “It’s a very real conundrum... The element of conscience is a tension that underlies all waste prevention initiatives. The message of prevention just doesn’t sit well with modern lifestyles. In my grandparents’ time, they’d be mending their shoes, making do and mend[ing], but the last and current generations have been brought up to consume fairly freely. If consumption patterns changed so drastically in a relatively short period of time as they did, we’re hoping that they can change back again just as quickly. It’s easier to recycle than it is to change your actions and attitudes, but hopefully with education and promotion, we can get better at changing behaviour.”

Indeed, Ireland’s NWPP is a damning critique of our consumer society. According to the plan, one of the major challenges in waste prevention is the fact that we have: ‘a consumer society focused on convenience, fashion, obsolescence and high turnover of goods’. To reduce the amount of waste we produce then, we must first break the hold that disposable income, fashion, consumer trends, media pressure and a feeling of entitlement have over us. No mean feat – especially when you consider that even with social behaviour changes aside, waste prevention is also very hard to encourage from an economic level: in order for a market to grow, people need to buy more, not less. “The central conundrum at waste prevention policy is how can we encourage waste prevention and still see our economies to grow? It’s still something we need to tackle”, says Byrne.

Propagating behaviour change is most easily done at ground-, rather than from high-, level. Defra has stated that it will encourage local authorities to develop their own waste prevention programmes, and WRAP has already published a Household Waste Prevention Toolkit to help councils produce plans for their householders. One local authority that is pioneering innovative waste prevention schemes is the North London Waste Authority (NLWA), which has had its waste prevention plan in place since 2008. The most recent version of the plan (2012-2014) cost £403,000 and is expected to decrease waste arisings by around 7,783 tonnes.

The plan includes: promoting the LFHW campaign through roadshows (which 93 per cent of attendants said improved their knowledge of good waste issues); ‘Sew Good’ workshops (in partnership with TRAID), which teach sewing and mending techniques to extend the life of clothes; installing 80 small WEEE bins around the area; encouraging home composting by giving away free composting bins; and funding the Real Nappy campaign, by paying £54.15 per child, which in 2010/11 diverted 465 tonnes of nappy waste from landfill. The NLWA is also now seeking funding to develop a waste prevention campaign with local manufacturing companies to decrease packaging waste and produce an annual waste prevention guide for businesses.

Local and regional authorities looking to start waste prevention projects in their areas can also call on the EU-wide Pre-waste project, which delivers guidelines for planning, implementing and monitoring regional waste prevention policies, lists good practice examples, and promotes a web tool that can assess the efficiencies of waste prevention projects. Although waste prevention is hard to quantify and monitor on a high level, councils can take steps to measure the amount of waste prevented on the ground level. For example, measuring the amount of municipal solid waste (MSW) per household, the number of householders registered with the Mail Preference Service, the number of composting bins sold/given away by the council, etc, will all help determine how much waste is being produced (and thus determine if rates are decreasing).

Encouraging waste prevention is a real and difficult problem to tackle. But, as yet, the UK is not willing to ‘enforce’ waste prevention, by penalising those who do not do it. Opponents of pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) systems say that taxing waste would only create an increase in fly-tipping and argue that the message of prevention has not been put forward enough to warrant fining people for not doing it. But PAYT systems do often see marked changes in behaviour in relatively short periods of time. Landkreis Schweinfurt, in Germany for example, saw a 43 per cent reduction in residual waste following the introduction of variable charging which took into account: bin volume; collection frequency; and weight, with recycling rates increasing from 64 per cent to 76 per cent in one year.

Radical actions are sometimes required to get definitive results and, with England’s slow start to delivering its NWPP, a PAYT system could well kick-start a change in both mentality and behaviour, and promote the ‘waste not want not’ attitudes we, as a nation, so much want and need.