There is one way in which 2015 will be like 2009. Red-top newspapers and the
blogosphere will be in uproar. Thanks to the purblind, immoral bureaucracies
of Brussels and Westminster, hard-working local councillors will be
bankrupted by vindictive courts, the no-longer-peaceful home counties will
be ripped open by mining conglomerates, and suburban families will be woken
before dawn by the crowing of cockerels. “World gone mad: it’s official”.
The truth, as ever, will make less compelling headlines. The world went mad
several decades ago, and what we’ll have to suffer is the cure. Madness was
in the 1990s and early noughties, when myopic local authorities were lured
into penal contracts with waste companies that wanted a guaranteed long-term
supply of unrecycled rubbish to burn in their incinerators. Madness was the
Local Government Association wanting retailers to pay for the disposal of
“waste” food packaging while councils ignored their own responsibility to
collect and recycle it. Madness was the same councils sending valuable
recyclable material to landfills along with millions of tonnes of uneaten
food.
It will not be madness to put all this right. So far, the nation’s recycling
effort has been a disconnected shambles. Left to their own devices, councils
have varied so widely in their behaviour that there might as well have been
no policy at all. Some ask householders to separate their rubbish into
recyclable and non-recyclable. Others want as many as five, while the slob
end of the spectrum keeps going with a single unsorted collection,
everything mucked in together. Some collect glass; some don’t. Some are
equipped to handle the full range of theoretically recyclable plastics; many
don’t even try.
Much of the plastic and glass is so contaminated by other rubbish that it is
impossible to recycle. Even when it is recycled, glass often ends up in road
aggregates, not in bottles or jars. Easy jokes have been made about the
“politically correct” redesignation of waste disposal as “resource
management”. But this is not just another example of world-gone-mad
euphemism or a public-sector job creation scheme. It is the dawning of
understanding. The time is not very far away when recycled metals will be a
bigger market than freshly mined ores (it’s happened already with gold). The
time is not very far away when glass and plastic bottles are not merely
recycled but re-used, like the milk and soft-drinks bottles of old.
We will all notice the difference, and, if certain sections of the media play
true to form, we will be incited to resent it. The first essential,
therefore, is to kill our misconceptions. The last thing we need is the kind
of worthy spasm that made people think they could save the planet with jute
shopping bags. Reducing our consumption of plastic carrier bags (400 per
household last year, according to Defra, the Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs) is useful in the sense that every little helps.
Nobody likes them, and they are a persistent source of litter that can be
fatal to marine wildlife when they find their way, as they often do, into
the sea. In early April Defra launched a new Get a Bag Habit campaign,
replete with media-friendly statistics. The 9.9 billion bags distributed in
the UK in 2008, it said, were “enough to fill 188 Olympic swimming pools,
and if laid end to end they would reach to the moon and back seven times”.
This is all very vivid, but it doesn’t do much for our sense of perspective. A
South Gloucestershire District Council survey reveals that plastic acc-ounts
for only 18% of what people throw away. Break this down further, and you
find that bags make up just 18% of total plastic waste, or 3.24% of what’s
in your wheelie bin. Compare this with clingfilm (23% of total plastics), or
other non-recyclable plastics (36%), and ask yourself whether we’ve got our
priorities right. No surprise, such earthly comparisons do not figure in
Defra’s guff. They would rather gaze at the moon. For government and the
supermarkets, the bag campaign has been a cheap and easy option, a populist
gesture that points in the direction of conservation but spares them the
cost of having to do anything more meaningful. It even makes a bit of money
for shopkeepers who, in the name of the suffering planet, can now charge
customers for their bags.
If we want seriously to move towards a cleaner and less wasteful world in
2015, we must sharpen our focus. This means aiming at the right targets.
Over the years, a lot of good intentions have been misspent in assaults on
packaging. Led astray by the philosophical corner-cutting of popular
opinion-formers, people didn’t understand that seemingly “excessive”
shelf-packaging allowed manufacturers to cut back on transit packaging and
so make overall savings. Neither, in their urge to be angry, did they take
account of improvements in hygiene, bulk handling and storage, extended
shelf life and reduced food waste.
Bananas are a good example. One comment heard ad infinitum from complainers is
that nature has already designed the perfect package — their thick yellow
skin — so extra wrapping is wasteful. What they don’t mention, because
nobody has told them, is that 1.6m bananas are thrown away by UK consumers
every day, and many more are discarded by retailers after customers have
broken up the bunches. “Foodies” may squawk, but the fact is that packing
bananas in modified-atmosphere bags extends shelf life, reduces waste and
cuts cost. Like it or not, the same is true for potatoes, grapes and salad
leaves. Cucumbers, being 96% water, dry out so rapidly that they are
unsaleable after three days if they are not wrapped. A gram and a half of
plastic film keeps them going for a fortnight.
Another focus of complaint has been the export of waste paper and plastic
bottles to China, regularly rolled out as proof that recycling in the UK is
failing. Much depends on how you measure success. If you take carbon
footprint as the indicator, the fact is that shipping paper and plastic
10,000 miles to China creates less CO² than sending them to landfill in the
UK. This is not to say that recycling here would not be preferable, merely
that exporting recyclable waste is hardly a scandal.
Reducing packaging is no longer the key argument. All but a few organic
fetishists understand that paper, cardboard, glass, aluminium and plastic
are essential to the logistics of delivery, storage and supply, and realise
that price competition means manufacturers and retailers have a strong
incentive to minimise the cost of packaging. But even this is not as
straightforward as it looks. Since 2005 the government-funded Waste &
Resources Action Programme (Wrap) has signed up 37 of the UK’s biggest food
manufacturers and retailers to the Courtauld Commitment, a voluntary scheme
designed both to cut food waste and reduce the weight of packaging.
Companies claiming success include most of the aristocracy of the grocery
trade — Asda, Boots, Britvic, Cadbury, Coca-Cola, the Co-op, Danone, Duchy
Originals, Heinz, M&S, Mars, Morrisons, Muller, Nestlé, Northern Foods,
Procter & Gamble, Sainsbury’s, Somerfield, Tesco, United Biscuits,
Waitrose, Young’s Seafood… The cuts relate to particular products — examples
include Robinsons fruit squashes, Coca-Cola, Heinz tomato ketchup and Hula
Hoops — rather than total output, but they are all steps in the right
direction.
Wrap’s first declared target, to arrest the overall growth in packaging
weight, was achieved last year, and it remains bullish about the rest. By
2010 it aims to achieve an absolute reduction in packaging waste and a
155,000-tonne cut in wasted food. But are these the right targets? Is
reduced weight all that matters? If it is, we can break out a bottle of
Co-op whisky (the world’s first 70cl spirits bottle to duck under the
300-gram barrier) and drink to a cleaner planet. But let us not sip too
soon. Packaging weight is not the only issue. What about the carbon budget?
Does less packaging mean less CO²?
Jane Bickerstaffe, director of the trade group Incpen (Industry Council for
Packaging and the Environment), thinks Wrap is tilting at the wrong
windmill. Manufacturers and retailers, she says, should be expected to
navigate the supply chain with minimum expenditure of resources, but should
decide for themselves how to achieve it. “Only they have expert knowledge of
how much protection a product needs. It depends how high it’s stacked, how
it fits in the lorry, speed of filling, height of retail shelf, temperature,
etc. That allows them to consider all the options, including the use of
recycled materials rather than virgin if it does the job, even though
recycled paper needs to be thicker and heavier to provide the same
strength.” Wrap’s obsession with weight-saving, she believes, has actually
discouraged recycling, and made quantity more important than quality.
The Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) has warned that
good-sounding modifications can have unintended consequences. A soft-drinks
manufacturer conscientiously red-uced the weight of its glass bottles by
20%, then found that they shattered during shipping or snapped at the neck
when customers tried to twist off the caps. And what works in one market
might not work in another. Televisions, for example, are usually shipped in
container-loads of 400, with an average damage rate of one per container.
When Dixons exported to Scandinavia, the rate went up to four or five, and
sometimes to as many as 14. The culprit, it turned out, was recycled
cardboard packaging, which, being more absorbent than virgin material, was
fatally weakened by Scandinavian humidity.
Others argue that recycling is the wrong priority. We need to reuse jars and
bottles, not recycle them, and CO² is the bottom line. Whichever view we
take, the political and social objectives converge. If we are to move
towards sustainability, then conspicuous over-consumption will have to
become as socially unacceptable as burglary. Ideally, we should use nothing
that cannot be used again, and some ancient liberties (the right to chuck
everything into the same bin, for example) will be infringed. Inevitably
there will be a backlash. The same libertarians who deny climate change will
also moan about Stalinist Eurodiktats, nanny states and greenwashing.
Environmentalists will argue among themselves, and despite creative
accountants claiming to have achieved “zero waste”, perfect solutions will
remain elusive. This should not deter us from our efforts to make them less
imperfect, or to make zero our target. As Andy Moore, campaign co-ordinator
of the Campaign for Real Recycling (CRR), puts it, zeroism “has been useful
in moving manacled thinking along”.
Above all, the disconnected muddle needs to gel into a cogent, unifying policy
that co-ordinates every step from raw materials through manufacture and
distribution to consumption, reuse and recycling. Only governments can do
this — that is governments in the plural, because the global economy
precludes local solutions. Some policy objectives — such as nationwide
standardisation of waste-sorting priorities — are obvious. Others are
counter-intuitive.
In 2009, for example, a company that sells you any item of electronic or
electrical equipment is legally bound to take your old one in return. This
means fewer fridges dumped in ditches, which sounds good, but it does
nothing to deter built-in obsolescence or the wasteful demands of changing
fashion. The sooner a product is got out of the way, the sooner the trade
can sell you another one. Even the most expensive washing machines currently
have only a three-year guarantee. The CRR’s Andy Moore argues that this
needs to change. Appliances in future should be designed for longer life,
with regulations tightened to enforce repairability and 10-year product
guarantees. The old values of build-to-last and lifetime-of-use will have to
be reasserted. Throwawayism cannot be the way of the future.
Perhaps it should not even remain the way of the past. One of the more extreme
ideas, guaranteed to mobilise protesters all over the country, is to reopen
old landfills and mine them for metals. “It raises horrendous environmental
and planning issues,” says Arnold Black, director of the Resource Efficiency
Knowledge Transfer Network, “but most of the organic stuff will have already
rotted away and discharged its methane, so it probably wouldn’t smell bad.”
Nobody has yet made an estimate of how much steel and aluminium lies
unclaimed, or what it might be worth, but they are the kinds of numbers that
would push Defra’s trip-to-the-moon gazers into Warp 5.
Regardless of whether or not these seams are ever mined, their very existence
chides us. There is nothing new in the notion that muck means brass. In
Victorian England, waste contractors paid parish authorities for the right
to collect their rubbish. Sifters in dust yards riddled the heaps for any
fragments of stuff — broken bricks, oyster shells, rags and bones, tin,
leather — that could be used again or recycled into glue or dye. The residue
of ash went into fertiliser or was mixed into clay for brickmaking. For
them, our “world gone mad” headlines would have the simple ring of truth.
All the stuff we’ve so blithely chucked away — the paper and card, steel and
aluminium, the different coloured glasses and various weights of plastic —
all have a value. In its most recent market trawl, Wrap found prices ranging
from £18 a tonne for mixed glass to £550 for aluminium cans. Separated glass
varied from £20 for green to £27 for amber and £30 for clear. Plastics
ranged from £140 for mixed to £240 for food-grade polymers and £230 for
film.
As the markets grow and stabilise, so all these will increase (in February
alone, mixed plastic went up by £88). But what the figures make clear is
that the best returns are from high-quality, clean and sorted materials that
are easy to recycle. Thus Slob Borough Council, with its commingled
collections in which everything is smeared with everything else, is doing
more than just foul its own nest. It is costing its taxpayers money. “Source
separation” by the public is essential to any scheme that is going to
deliver maximum benefit, and people need to understand that the benefit is
theirs. If there is anything that cries out for investment in a recession,
this must be it.
Whatever we do now, we won’t be entirely clean by 2015. But at least we should
have got our priorities straight. New infrastructure takes years to plan,
design and build, and investors will need a strong lead from government if
they are to risk their money. Andy Moore wants to see serious new investment
in reprocessing, including funding for local authorities upgrading their
services, fiscal incentives for manufacturers to use secondary rather than
virgin materials, and greater standardisation of packaging. By this he means
limiting the number of materials.
At the moment, says Arnold Black, “fourteen industrial plastics are used in
different combinations, for no better reason than that the public has got
used to the look and feel of things”. Sorting and recovery would be much
easier if this could be reduced. Moore suggests that no more than four might
be needed in supermarkets, and that the public would quickly learn to
separate them for collection. Black suggests this could be made even easier
by colour coding, and that bigger savings could be achieved if we curbed our
enthusiasm for transparency. “If we didn’t want to see the Coca-Cola in the
bottle,” he says, “we could use opaque plastic rather than
clear.” This would increase the usefulness, and hence value, of mixed
plastic waste.
But there is an elephant in the room. The last resort for “residual” rubbish —
the stuff that can’t be recycled — is burning in vast incinerators that
generate heat and power. These are operated by companies which, by their
very nature, need a guaranteed supply of mixed waste to feed the fires.
Local authorities are contractually bound for up to 25 years to maintain the
flow, with penalties if they fail. By 2015 these will increasingly be in
conflict with tighter regulation and more efficient recycling that should
drastically reduce the rubbish left for burning. Andy Moore predicts that
local taxpayers faced with surcharges will want to see the authors of this
folly — former councillors and officials — in court.
The other scandal, implicating us all, is food waste. Big numbers are seldom
easy to visualise — hence all the Olympic swimming pools and trips to the
moon — but some are so shocking that they need no embroidery. Households in
the UK buy approximately 21.7m tonnes of food every year, of which a third,
6.7m tonnes, never passes their lips. Only 19% of this is genuine waste —
vegetable peelings, bones, teabags and so forth. Most of the rest (4.1m
tonnes) is perfectly edible. More than a quarter of it is junked while still
in its wrapping. Out every year go 359,000 tonnes of potatoes, 328,000
tonnes of bread, 190,000 tonnes of apples, 161,000 tonnes of meat and fish
meals. Forty-five per cent of all salads are thrown away, along with 31% of
bakery goods and 26% of fruit. The litany of waste goes on and on: 200m
rashers of bacon, 440m sausages, 484m yoghurts, 775m bread rolls, a billion
tomatoes, 4.8 billion grapes…
Altogether, that is £10.2 billion of wasted food, or £420 per household. Even
this is not the whole story. A small proportion of the waste is fed to
animals or composted, but the vast bulk of it, 5.9m tonnes, goes into
landfill where it generates the powerful greenhouse gas methane.
We used to be better at this kind of thing. In the years after the second
world war, local authorities ran special collections for kitchen waste,
which they converted profitably into pigswill. Some even had their own
municipal piggeries. It can’t happen now. Pigs have not tasted swill since
2001, when it was blamed for an outbreak of foot-and-mouth. But pigs are not
the only possible converters of waste into food. Back-to-the-earth romantics
point to Flanders in Belgium, where the government subsidises householders’
chickens — reliable providers of eggs as well as flesh, and as omnivorous as
pigs. The avian flu scare damped down enthusiasm for the idea in the UK, but
who knows? When climate change puts paid to our lawns and borders, maybe a
chicken run will make better sense than weeds.
The likelier destinations for leftover food are anaerobic digesters — sealed
vessels in which biodegradable waste is broken down by bacteria. They
produce biogas, which can either be burnt to generate heat and power or used
as motor fuel; and bio-fertiliser for spreading on fields. This has the
added benefit of saving the huge quantities of energy needed to make
inorganic fertilisers, and hence cutting CO². Unlike subsidised chickens,
it’s an idea likely to run. Alistair Darling has given Wrap an extra £10m to
spend on development — enough to process about 300,000 tonnes of food waste
a year. By 2015, in reality or in prospect, it should be taking the last few
shreds of recoverable nourishment away from landfill and diverting them to
some kind of worthwhile use.
We should be looking at ourselves differently by then. World water and food
shortages and a looming energy crisis will have helped us recognise the
criminality of avoidable waste. It will no longer be thought smart, or hip,
or intellectually invigorating to play Canute, and scepticism will be
reserved for those few who think global warming isn’t happening. And it will
no longer be good enough just to know the price of everything. We have to
know its value.
WASTE MANIFESTO
For Government
- Set national standards for the collection and processing of household waste.
Separate collection of clean and sorted recyclables is the only way to
ensure quality and value
- Encourage recycling and reuse. Target tax incentives and penalties, with
returnable bottles a priority
- Charge for disposal of household appliances less than 10 years old
- Calculate carbon savings taking account of the whole process from
manufacture to disposal, not just packaging
For councils
- Change mind-set, viewing recycling as a moneymaking enterprise that profits
the local economy
- Work together. The laggards need to learn from the market leaders
For industry
- Design products and packaging to minimise the consumption of materials,
energy and water
- Cut waste by selling food and goods in various portion sizes for varying
lifestyles
- Standardise the use of plastics to make recycling easy and profitable
- Design electrical goods to last 10 years, with low-cost maintenance and
repairability offsetting higher prices
- Engage the public. More information about products means better choices
- Think long-term. Invest in researching and developing new materials and
recycling technology
For you
- Buy only what you need — stop buying food and clothes that will get thrown
away
- Learn more. In deciding what to buy, take account of overall energy and
material savings, as well as recyclability
- Take the small amount of time it takes to clean and sort household waste.
Sorted packaging has a value, and well-run recycling schemes work to
everyone’s advantage, economically as well as environmentally
- If local schemes are inadequate, demand improvement. This applies to
supermarket take-back schemes as well as local authority collections.
- Ask hard questions about what happens to the collected material
