The All-Party Parliamentary Sustainable Resource Group (APSRG) has published a collection of essays to help each stage of the supply chain to cut waste and become more resource efficient.

‘Link to Link: Driving Resource Efficiency across Supply Chains’ contains contributions from a range of companies and entities that discuss how increases in resource efficiency, waste reductions and material circularity can be achieved throughout the supply chain.

Topics in the collection include procurement, design and manufacture, logistics, consumer behaviour, business model innovation, SMEs, end-of-life and data management. Ten case studies look at potential solutions to resource efficiency in each stage.

The collection was sponsored by resource-efficiency company WRc, container manufacturer GJF Fabrications and waste management company SUEZ. All three contributed essays to the collection. Further essays were written by the University of Northampton, Feed-back, Northampton Business School, WRAP, the Knowledge Transfer Network, Eunomia Research & Consulting, Royal Holloway University of London and Greenclick.

Recommendations

To conclude the collection, the APSRG presents 12 recommendations to improve resource efficiency, most notably calling for the government to conduct a call for evidence from UK companies to determine barriers preventing them from being resource efficient.

In a survey of CEOs quoted in the collection, 84 per cent called for called for hard intervention by governments and policymakers to support circular and resource-efficient business models. Once the government has carried out a call for evidence, the APSRG states, it should prepare a plan to remove the regulatory barriers identified.

It suggests that promoting the systematic adoption of green procurement (GP) policies ‘will provide the UK with its single biggest “quick win” in its transition to a resource efficient circular economy’, as GP influences all aspects of the circular economy ‘from product design to innovation in service models and management of post-consumer discards’.

Other recommendations include: developing central and local government guidelines for resource-efficient practices, focusing on the procurement of refurbished and remanufactured goods; engaging with the European Commission in the revision of the Ecodesign Directive; extending funding to support remanufacturing; and working with industry across broad categories of products to develop voluntary agreements, ecolabels, and behaviour change campaigns.

Much more for government to do

In the collection’s foreword, APSRG Co-Chairs Barry Sheerman MP and Peter Aldous MP write: ‘The subject of resource use is now attracting the public interest as can be seen by increased prominence in national news: stories about plastic litter in our oceans, the decline of the steel industry, ‘wonky’ vegetables, and England’s recent single-use plastic bag charge are just a few examples of stories that have made headlines in the past year.

‘There is much more that government can do to support the organisations already making positive efforts to improve their resource efficiency, as well as encouraging further businesses and industries to take up the challenge. But it is not for government to do alone. This collection of essays will try to stimulate new thinking and inspire both industry and government to consider the environmental impact of their supply chains, and encourage more collaboration and shared best practice to improve resource efficiency and solidify their businesses whilst moving toward a more circular economy.’

Old model cannot continue

Upon the release of the collection, Sheerman and Aldous commented: “The UK needs to move towards a system where the entire supply chain of products moves towards the circular model. The old model of make, use, dispose cannot continue, and this is true of all sectors in the UK, not just the environmental services and waste industries.”

GJF’s recently appointed Managing Director, Dr David Gillett, said: “Maximum value for a resource stream may this morning be incineration and this afternoon reprocessing. In order to maximise value in these ‘spot markets’, operators will need excellent logistics, software for resource consolidation, routing and trading, and containers designed with highly efficient logistics in mind and minimising tare weight and carbon footprint. These capabilities are not as mature as they need to be to achieve high economic efficiency.

“GJF Thinking’s analysis indicates the industry will move to a fusion between the collection and handling skills of the waste and recycling operators and the consolidation, handling and routing skills of globally leading logistics companies, routing the resources to the multiplicity of end-points. We think trade associations will also play a role by driving the closed loop approach to specific waste sub-groups that are costly to deal with.

“Our research suggests this will make the industry look considerably different by 2020 and we will be using our research and working with operators and logistics companies to ensure we have designed the right containment solutions to meet their needs.”

The full ‘Link to Link: Driving Resource Efficiency across Supply Chains’ report can be downloaded from the Policy Connect website.