Picture credit: Green Alliance

Central government should overhaul the way it approaches waste and resources by creating a £250-million ‘challenge fund’ for local authorities that could help bring ‘circular infrastructure’ online, a new report by the Circular Economy Task Force has said.

‘Wasted opportunities: Smarter systems for resource recovery’ is the second report from the Circular Economy Task Force (a business-led group convened by Green Alliance) and outlines a series of recommendations for how government could redesign the current system so that materials are seen as ‘resource’ rather than ‘waste’ and so that larger numbers of ‘high-quality’ materials are collected.

Report details

According to the group, current British recycling policy is based on ‘outdated assumptions about resources, which reinforce an expensive, stagnating system’.

Highlighting that recycling rates were up just 0.2 per cent between 2012 and 2013, and that just two per cent of waste electronics is reused ‘even though 23 per cent is suitable for reuse’, the report highlights that for many local authorities, ‘the organisation and scale of their collection and management activities is almost wholly unrelated to the quality and optimal flows of the materials they manage’.

Indeed, the Circular Economy Task Force estimates that approximately £1.7 billion worth of plastics, food and electronics is lost to the economy due to a lack of consistent, relevant infrastructure (one based on keeping materials in the loop, rather than one based on disposal).

Recommendations

As such, it calls on government to set common collection standards for councils and ‘empower bottom-up collaboration between entrepreneurial councils’ by creating a £250-million challenge fund for circular infrastructure (the same amount allocated by the Department for Communities and Local Government for its controversial Weekly Collection Support Scheme).

According to the taskforce, a fund would ‘enable councils to design their systems together, so that sufficient high quality materials become available to justify private sector investment in recycling and remanufacturing facilities’. It suggests that these could include businesses like closed-loop plastics factories; anaerobic digestion plants; and waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE) refurbishers.

This fund, the report adds, would support three actions:

• having local authorities officers or waste companies assess municipal, commercial and industrial waste arisings across different authorities to ‘understand the feedstock potential for high quality recovery facilities’;
• funding staff to broker agreements across local authority boundaries and work with waste companies to ‘deliver quality material to reprocessors in a way that maximises value through reuse and high quality recycling’ and;
• providing a seed fund for ‘a financial stability mechanism’ that would address market price volatility concerns.

Other suggestions outlined in the report include:

• designating some materials (such as plastics and WEEE) and associated infrastructure as ‘nationally significant’ to boost collection and higher-quality materials;
• incentivising manufacturers to use recycled content in their products, for example by offsetting the use of recycled plastic against producers’ packaging waste obligations;
• changing the way electronic and electrical products are designed so that they can be easily refurbished or disassembled (i.e. through the EU ecodesign regulations) and weighting manufacturers’ WEEE obligations according to the repairability or recyclability of their products;
• including design standards in government procurement requirements.

‘Local authorities are stuck in an institutional model’

Writing in the foreword to the report, Julie Hill, Chair of the Circular Economy Task Force, said: ‘In Westminster, enlightened politicians from all parties are beginning to explore the concept and seeking to incorporate the ambition to be more circular into their manifestos.

‘But against this positive trend is the beleaguered Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [Defra], with little resource or central government encouragement to be the driver of the circular economy, and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills [BIS] and the Treasury have yet to fully take on board the scale of the opportunity. Local authorities are stuck in an institutional model that has them still dealing with ‘waste’ rather than empowered to reap the value of resources, and unable to return that value to their citizens in any significant way…

‘We need a shake up… This [report] isn’t a precise prediction about how a circular economy would work, but it sets some guidelines for business and government for redesigning the system.’

Author of the report, Dustin Benton, added: “Local authorities spend more on waste management than housing or planning. Valuable raw materials are lost while businesses are frustrated by a lack of usable recycled materials. The system both stymies demand for recycled materials and prevents businesses investing.

“The problem is structural. The government could easily turn this around by reforming the system to help businesses get the UK moving toward a circular economy.”

Several Circular Economy Task Force members have welcomed the report, with Dan Cooke, Director of External Affairs at waste management company Viridor, saying: “Viridor already operates a ‘closed loop’ polymers recycling plant and is building another one to capture the most value from recyclable materials. Scaling up collection systems would create the potential for us to do much more, and help deliver a more efficient, lower cost system.”

Andrew Jenkins, ‎Sustainable Development Manager for Products at pharmaceutical company Boots UK, added: “Greater consistency of collection and recycling systems would help ensure the reliability of material supply thereby facilitating the design and specification of more products incorporating recycled materials.”

'Responsibility for driving significant change sits right across the supply chain'

However, despite welcoming the emphasis placed by the report on the need for a fundamental structural change, the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) said that the report 'fails to acknowledge that the responsibility for driving significant change sits right across the supply chain'.

CIWM Chief Executive Steve Lee explained: "While the report is clear on the shortcomings of collection systems that are built around local authorities' statutory duty to collect household waste, it fails to acknowledge that the responsibility for driving significant change sits right across the supply chain. It is quiet on the role of consumer perception and behaviour, political will at both local and national level, the reprocessing industries, and those who manufacture the products that become waste. It also underplays the impact of the ongoing budget constraints faced by local government and the fact that the separation, collection and processing of waste into high value secondary materials also costs money.

"There are certainly lessons to be learned from other countries, and we are starting to see the results of a very different approach in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland where the policy landscape is being shaped to deliver better outcomes for both household and C&I [commercial and industrial] waste, tied in to a clear vision of the value of recovered resources to the national economy. In contrast, we don't have a robust policy framework or political leadership here in England and without this we will not resolve the inherent tension between providing a statutory, local waste and recycling service and realising the wider economic and environmental benefits of effective resource recovery."

Chief Executive of the Resource Association, Ray Georgeson added: "The report provides an excellent signpost for the potential for investment in new reprocessing, especially in plastics, WEEE and food waste processing through AD. While some circular economy commentators and experts expressed frustration that the report and the event focused too much on recycling and waste policy rather than their favoured topics of design, innovation and ‘new business models’ on this occasion I didn’t share their frustration.

"We need to look ahead and plan for the ambition inherent in the circular economy, but getting the basics right in the materials supply chain to encourage manufacturing investment and reducing material security concerns also needs to happen now. High quality recycling collection and reprocessing infrastructure is an essential ingredient of the future circular economy and must not be dismissed to the margins of the debate.”

He added that he hoped the report would be 'on the top of the in-tray for incoming Defra Secretary of State Liz Truss'.

Read the ‘Wasted opportunities: Smarter systems for resource recovery’ report.