How not to waste the future

What do we need to do to get this mounting problem under control — and to shift it towards sustainability?

One of the most pressing needs is to raise public awareness of the issues. But information about waste in the abstract is yawn-making, and attracts little interest. For the most part, the public only gets excited when a new recycling plant or landfill site is proposed on their doorstep.

A number of local authorities — including Hampshire and Cambridgeshire — have run information campaigns when developing their local waste strategies or when waste facilities are being proposed, but until now there has been no effective national information initiative equivalent to, say, the ‘clunk click every trip’ message on seatbelts.

That’s starting to change with the Rethink Rubbish campaign: the first ‘umbrella’ consumer waste awareness initiative (www.rethinkrubbish.com). Retailers including Tesco, Waitrose, Halfords and Boots, as well as the likes of Graham Norton and Bobby Robson, are helping to spread the word. Local authorities and the waste sector are of course on side too, but rather worryingly a giant street-legal motorised dustbin is the centrepiece of a planned roadshow.

Obviously the hope is that an informed public will be better able to make sound purchasing choices, as well as being motivated to recycle or compost their waste. Hampshire County Council’s public education programme, launched in 1992, has helped push household recycling rates up to 25% — although there’s been no reduction in the total amount of waste generated.

Businesses need to make wise purchasing choices, as well as implementing waste reduction, re-use and recycling measures to comply with regulations. Better management of resources will result in an improved bottom line, as the businesses that have already undertaken such measures can attest. Indeed, some of the savings are dramatic. In Leicestershire, a waste minimisation association comprising 13 member companies identified more than 400 minimisation opportunities, and saved its members £250,000. It also cut the amount of waste going to landfill by 4,000 tonnes per year, and reduced water consumption by 7,000m3, effluent discharges by 50,000m3 and energy use by 8.8 million kW hours. They identified further potential annual savings of more than £400,000, and (not surprisingly) won Best Waste Minimisation Project of the Year in the 2001 National Recycling Awards.

To government falls the task of setting consistent and integrated policy which places waste in the context of sustainable resource use. Fiscal measures can be punitive (e.g. taxes) or positive (e.g. subsidies). Providing tax breaks for ‘green’ industries is among the fiscal measures which will influence corporate behaviour, with proper funding of an effective regulator the necessary ‘stick’ to accompany those carrots.

The landfill tax was proclaimed the UK’s first environmental tax, but its critics have been divided over whether it was pitched too high or too low: it is currently charged (with a few exceptions) at a rate of £12 for every tonne of waste sent to landfill. Other criticisms include the claim that it has not actually served as a sufficient incentive for increased waste diversion. When first introduced in 1996 (at a rate of £7 per tonne, increasing by £1 a year), there were dire predictions of an increase in fly tipping by businesses trying to avoid the higher disposal cost — a fear that has largely proved groundless.

On the plus side, large sums of money have been provided by landfill companies to a variety of environmental schemes — although not all of them have enhanced recycling or raised waste management standards or awareness, and rather more village halls have benefited than were perhaps originally intended. The government has just completed a consultation process to examine the tax and its administration, and to consider ways to improve it by a 2004 deadline. To reduce administration overheads and enable the money to be spent constructively and without duplication, a central pot of cash distributed by a single body may well be the most effective approach.

Beyond the landfill tax, a greater use of the tax system to influence resource consumption as a whole seems a logical next step to many. The Environment Agency has called for ‘smart taxation’, with charges set according to environmental impacts. This would provide incentives to industry to alter product specifications in such a way as to eliminate particularly noxious wastes, as well as to reduce the total. Taxing of virgin materials could provide funds for establishing more capacity to reprocess secondary ones; in this regard, the aggregates tax may prove to be the first of a number of similar measures.

Then there’s the question of how best to charge householders to encourage waste minimisation and recycling in the home. Unlike business, which already pays directly and transparently for its waste treatment, households contribute indirectly through their council tax, each paying the same proportion regardless of the amount and quality of waste they generate.

Direct charging of householders, to provide them with incentives to reduce their waste, is another fiscal measure which has been discussed, but apparently discarded, by the current government. This seems a missed opportunity to focus the attention of individuals on their consumption patterns. There are a number of different charging schemes in other countries, known as ‘pay as you throw’ or ‘pay by weight’, some of which are more successful than others, but all of which have the advantage of raising the public’s awareness of the rubbish they produce. As kerbside recycling becomes more widespread, it brings with it the opportunity gradually to reduce the size of collection bins and so impose charges for volumes which exceed an agreed standard. The use of approved rubbish bags, which must be purchased (thus paying for their collection), is one simple scheme that has been successfully used in other countries such as Switzerland, and in trials in Britain. Another alternative is the purchase of ‘bag tags’: a pilot scheme using these is under way in the Kent village of Wye.

19 July 2002

Maggie Thurgood