The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has made available its ‘unfinished draft’ of guidance on separate recycling collections and what qualifies as ‘technically, environmentally, and economically practicable’ (TEEP) that was agreed with Wales.

Background to the guidance

According to the UK’s transposition of the EU’s revised Waste Framework Directive (the Waste Regulations (Amendment) 2012), by 2015, every waste collection authority must have in place separate collections for waste paper, metal, plastic and glass when they are necessary to ‘facilitate or improve recovery’ and are TEEP.

Defra and the Welsh Government had been jointly working on guidance to help clarify what recycling services local councils should be offering under EU/UK law (and ‘minimise the risk of local authorities facing a challenge’), but in January 2014, Defra said that “local authorities should be aware of the requirements relating to collection of dry recycling material” and that it “did not believe” there was “a need to issue further guidance”. (However, the government-funded Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) recently launched a non-statutory ‘route map’ for local authorities to help assess compliance with the regulations, and the Welsh Government is currently consulting on draft guidance on separate collections.)

The statement followed on from an open letter to councils from Lord de Mauley shortly before he was replaced as Resources Minister by Dan Rogerson. In it, he warned that ‘any local authorities considering new collection or disposal plans should take care to ensure that they are placing themselves in a position to fulfil their legal duties from 2015. This is particularly important for local authorities who may be considering moving away from separate collection, or including glass within a co-mingled stream. Local authorities should consult their own lawyers as necessary, and should keep a clear audit trail given the potential for legal challenge.’

The de Mauley letter reflects some of the information in the draft, unfinished guidance, such as the warning that glass may not be suitable for co-mingled collection.

Unfinished guidance details

The document, made public by Defra after it received an Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) request, is entitled ‘Denbighshire guidance’, as the council requested the information from the government department under the EIR. The titular Welsh council currently operates a co-mingled recycling system.

It states that two or more waste streams may be collected using a co-mingled system if the recyclate produced is similar in ‘both quality and quantity’ to that achieved with ‘good separate collection’ and can be reprocessed into a product of similar quality to what it was originally, but that ‘this is not commonly the case for glass’.

When referring to what is defined as ‘practicable’, the document states that ‘technically practicable’ means that separate collection may be implemented through a system that has been ‘technically developed and proven to function in practice’; ‘environmentally practicable’ refers to the fact that the ‘added value of ecological benefits justifies possible negative environmental effects’; and ‘economically practicable’ means that separate collections do not ‘cause excessive costs’ in comparison with the treatment of a non-separated waste stream.

The draft goes on to outline that failure to comply with the regulatory requirements will see the Environment Agency issue either a compliance notice, requiring an operator or authority to ‘take specified steps within a period to ensure that a contravention does not continue or recur’, or a stop notice, ‘prohibiting any further activity until steps specified in the notice are complied with’.

Draft carries ‘no status’

However, the letter from Defra to the person requesting the EIR request states that the unfinished draft ‘carries no status’ and that there are no plans to publish it in England.

It adds that officials concluded government guidance was ‘unlikely to add much to what is already set out in regulations and other documents’.

Read WRAP’s TEEP ‘route map’or the Welsh Government’s draft guidance.