This supplement is an independent publication from Raconteur Media May 12 2009
WASTE MANAGEMENT & RECYCLING
From zero to hero
From zeto hero
Our mining heritage meant an ignominious legacy of landfill. But thanks to unlikely heroes such as the Landfill Tax, the waste management industry is finally breaking the habit, writes Lucy SiegleRePlatwour ve
Recycling is as old as the hills (even RPlato referenced it). Somehow Rwe forgot and over centuries Rour verdant, undulating landscape was steadily filled with debris, shovelled into the large pits left over from the frenzied extraction industries of the Industrial Revolution. For the UK’s nascent waste management industry, (created in 1947 by the Town and Country Act), the approach to rubbish was best described as out-of-sight, out-of-mind. It required a Herculean effort to be-gin to overturn this rubbish dogma, but it’s finally happening. “I don’t think the waste management situation feels particularly revolution-ary on any given day,” admits Steve Lee, CEO of the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM), “but we are in the middle of a resources, en-ergy and environment revolution. In the last five or six years we’ve got to a recycling and composting performance of around 35 per cent of all our house-hold waste. That is a four to five-fold improvement from 2000.”The seeds of change were sown by the UN’s 1987 Brundtland report that defined sustainability. Previously, any-one in search of a visceral depiction of non-sustainable growth only had to head off to the nearest landfill. But once you buy into the idea that the earth has a limited and quantifiable carrying ca-pacity, shovelling unrestricted and in-creasing levels of waste into the ground is exposed as the worst outcome. “In reality there’s plenty of landfill space still being made,” says Mr Lee, debunking the myth that the driver for change is lack of landfill. “The point is that landfill is undesirable for environ-mental reasons.” These include leachate pollution and the fact that biodegrad-able waste (each year the EU produces between 75 and 100 million tonnes ofbiowaste) rotting in landfill creates methane gas, 21 times more potent than CO2. In any case, the wholesale dump-ing of material streams also wastes re-sources, even biodegradable waste that could be transformed to high grade compost for increasingly impoverished European soils. Landfill is a hard habit to break. Af-ter a bumpy initial period when Land-fill Tax (introduced in the Finance Act of 1996) was set too low, it was intro-duced as: “the UK’s first tax with an explicit environmental purpose.” It has proven to be a critical piece of tough love – driving that waste management industry from landfill into the arms ofrecycling and waste minimisation.The Landfill Tax was raised in April to £40 per tonne. And according to a recent Waste & Resources Action Pro-A Powerful IdeaEnergy from Waste (EfW) plants have changed from being public enemy number one into super efficient tourist attractions Page 4 gram (WRAP) report, emerging waste facilities such as, Mechanical biological treatment (MBT) of waste, with higher environmental credentials, becomes a truly competitive alternative to landfill.To see this lever in action, look at the recently agreed £640 million Private Finance Initiative (PFI) waste and recy-cling contract for Greater Manchester to deal with 1.3 million tonnes of munici-pal waste a year. New technologies willcost local residents an extra £1 per week, but the cost of a “do nothing, build noth-ing” option would have cost £2 a week, predominantly in Landfill Tax. Without this paradigm shift, the UK would still be languishing at the bot-tom of the European recycling tables, dubbed the “dirty man of Europe” and municipal recycling rates would never have increased to 35 per cent of waste (they need to reach 5 per cent by 2020). Mind your own businessTake waste management seriously and reap rewards. Fresh thinking will breed a raft ofopportunities Furthermore, the UK wouldn’t have a hope of meeting the EU Landfill Direc-tive, reducing levels of biodegradable municipal waste to 35 per cent of 1995 levels by 2020. Meanwhile, the waste management industry would not be progressively driving our waste streams higher up the waste hierarchy. In short, we would still be shovelling rubbish into holes in the ground.Page 6 Waste Savings Direct provides competitive edge to our clients by:-Waste Savings Direct provides competitive edge to our clients by:- Working in partnership to develop solutions to exploit current and evolving waste opportunities. Working in partnership to develop solutions to exploit current and evolving waste opportunities. Bespoke solutions to increase recycling and reduce carbon footprint. Contractually guaranteed cost reductions.titive edge to our clients by:-titive edge to our clients by:-ent and evolving waste opportunities.ent and evolving waste opportunities.Interested? To learn more and start improving you’re environmental performance visit www.wastesavingsdirect.co.uk or contact sales@wastesavingsdirect.co.uk 20 leading innovationsThe selected firms have demonstrated a number of characteristics that makes them stand out in the waste sector Page 8