Cracking down on commercial waste

The drive towards a greener Britain is now gathering pace. What was a trickle has, through public demand, European legislation and government initiatives, has turned into a flood of environmental initiatives. With households increasingly taking up the mantle of recycling, the incentive for businesses to do the same has so far been mixed.
Some companies have been keen to stress their environmental credentials, joining schemes such as the Mayor of London’s Green500 project that aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions through individual action plans. The high profile Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) will have also have a dramatic effect on companies’ emissions (whether they like it or not) when it comes into force on 1 April 2010.

Now the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has issued a statement of intent for businesses to start reducing the amount of non-recyclable waste they produce. The less-than-glamorously titled Commercial and Industrial Waste in England: Statement of aims and actions 2009 might not have the might of the CRC scheme,
yet it has some important ideas.

The figures provided by the report date from a 2002/3 survey on types of waste produced and the percentage waste proportions that different sectors of the commercial and industrial produce. Arguably, the years since this survey will have seen a rise in the amount of recycled materials. Yet there is still some way to go. A particularly salient statistic on the subject is that it’s estimated in offices as much as 80 percent of binned materials could instead be recycled. On a countrywide scale this is a startling amount of unnecessary waste.

The solution to waste need not be expensive either. A Defra-sponsored study suggested that businesses could save an estimated £6.4bn a year through low or no cost resource efficiency energy and waste measures. Such potential savings during tough economic times should undoubtedly prove appealing to the industrial and commercial sectors.

This will especially be the case when the Government begins to raise landfill tax. This tax will aim to reduce all kinds of waste and divert waste materials from landfill to be put for more productive uses. The pressure will be on in this respect; in the 2009 budget, it was confirmed that the tax would rise by £8 a tonne each year from 2011 to 2013 – from £48 per tonne of waste sent to landfill from 1 April 2010, right the way up to £72 a tonne in 2013. It is hoped that rather than further burden businesses, the rise in this tax will incentivise the drive to invest in more sustainable alternatives to waste disposal and reduce reliance on landfill.

Defra has also announced its guidelines for a five year plan for reducing waste, that will function on a three tier strategy of central government, local government and businesses themselves.For businesses, aims are to design products for sustainability across the whole product lifecycle. This will include minimising their resource and environmental impacts in initial manufacture and use while considering their re-use and recyclability. Any residual waste should be treated as a resource to be re-used, recycled or recovered wherever possible.

Defra also aim to make businesses aware of the techniques and technologies available for extracting value from waste materials and products while, also promoting investment opportunities in the treatment of commercial and industrial waste.

In terms of local authorities, Defra outlines that there should be an increased push to lead from the front. In their role as planning authorities, councils should assure that there is a suitable network of facilities for the recovery and, where necessary, disposal of all types of waste. As a new initiative local authorities should also look at safe ways of consolidation commercial and industrial wastes along side similar household wastes. This would especially apply to the seven materials identified as ‘priority’ in the England Waste Strategy, which are paper, food, glass, aluminum, wood, plastic and textiles.

Defra has also outlined the need for local authorities to be aware of the potential value of the waste materials they collect. As such waste collection systems should be adapted to extract most value from those materials. Most importantly though is that businesses have adequate access to such facilities in the first place, either directly or through contractors, as over 10 percent of companies surveyed said their main obstacle to recycling was finding the facilities to do so.

On the national level, Defra says that government will make changes to encourage and advise businesses to design and manage products more sustainably, including considerations on the environmental and carbon impacts across the whole life of the product. It will also look to using existing policies to meet the UK’s climate change and other environmental objectives, including the reduction and recycling of waste and encouraging recovery of renewable energy from waste.

A long-term policy framework will also be put in place to encourage investment in waste recovery and disposal infrastructure by the private sector, including for hazardous waste. This will encompass new ideas about reassessing what goes into landfills, along with plans already floated such as carbon capture schemes for power stations as a way of getting rid of their waste carbon dioxide.

Finally, government will look to enforce existing legislation on waste disposal on every level. This will include both educational terms of making businesses aware of the legislation intended to reduce their waste output, as well as punitive measures, more likely to emerge as the CRC gets underway and companies attempt to play easy with the system.

This last point is perhaps a heavy handed way of ending Defra’s list of largely good intentions. It’s clear from its report that Defra understands that inducing increased waste reduction and recycling is as much about education and
raising awareness as anything else. In this way there is a sense of meeting businesses half way in terms of making facilities available and known to the companies who would benefit from  using them.

As businesses continue to wake up to the savings they can make through carbon output and waste reduction, it is clear that with the correct promotion environmental protection and resource recovery could become a major new field of investment for businesses. The message from Defra thus seems to be: the earlier businesses get started, the better.