Green Bill of Health

Businesses aren’t very good at recycling, but what can we do about it? This is one of the big debates at the moment. And in situations like this the cry is always for the Government to step in and SORT IT OUT.

Let’s look first at the assumption that businesses aren’t very good at recycling. I saw last week results from a survey of 130 businesses on one busy London high street. They included a good mix of retail, offices and food-based businesses.

I was a little shocked to see that a whopping 30% of them did no recycling at all and a further 20% only recycled something very simple like cooking oil or toner cartridges. That’s 50% of businesses doing virtually nothing to recycle their waste. But BPR Group’s own market research in our core market of Greater London offices suggests that 80% of offices have some kind of recycling scheme in place.

The reality is that we do not really know how good businesses are at recycling, so it is great news that Defra has commissioned research which will be available later this year. Only with accurate data can we begin to make proper decisions. I suspect the picture is not as bad as people might think, with most large producers of waste having been prodded into action by landfill tax rises.

But we can all agree that many firms could do a lot better at recycling. Can the Government sort it out - in fact, should the Government try to sort it out?

The first reaction many people have had to poor business waste figures is to cry “market failure”. The assumption is that any right-thinking business should recycle so, if it is not, it is because it somehow cannot access recycling services. The private sector must be failing to provide services to businesses, so councils must step in.

But remember that survey I mentioned? That busy London high street was Camden High Street. BPR Group has been offering recycling services in Camden for 20 years, and we are now joined by a whole host of other waste management companies. Camden Council has a long and successful track record of offering cheap, commercial recycling services. The 50% of businesses failing to recycle in the survey have not been let down by either the market or their council: they do not consider it to be important and are simply not that interested.

So can the Government sort it out? Offering cheap, subsidised recycling services to businesses will destroy the private sector companies currently providing the service successfully. Businesses that are already recycling will gladly switch and pocket the savings. The firms that do not recycle now will probably just remain disinterested.

BPR Group’s Carbon Smart subsidiary has measured more than 500 carbon footprints for businesses of all types. Of a typical business carbon footprint, what might you guess is made up by waste and recycling: 20%? 10%? 5%? The correct answer is 1%.

Whisper it quietly but, in the scheme of things, business waste recycling is a drop in the ocean. Government policy should be focusing on the big issues. Leave the landfill tax escalator to do its work and businesses will become interested as their waste costs rise. The private sector will be ready and able to step in as that happens.

Landfill is bad. This is one of the few things that everyone is able to agree on. But if landfill is bad, what is good in the world of waste disposal? Even with the best recycling schemes the UK must dispose of millions of tonnes of waste for which material recovery is not practical, cost effective or carbon positive.

Incineration has many proponents, recovering the energy in the residual waste to produce electricity and sometimes heat. Although widely used in Europe, it has become controversial in the UK. Even rebranded as energy-from-waste, any proposed plant faces a long, expensive and bruising battle to obtain planning consent.

So if we can’t bury or burn our waste, what can we do with it? One increasingly popular solution is Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT). Just the name sounds promising, to local politicians a high tech panacea to their waste disposal problem.MBT takes ‘black bag’ residual waste and in the ‘mechanical’ phase conveyors, trommels, shredders and other impressive power hungry machinery convert the incoming waste into two principal outputs.

The first is normally refuse derived fuel (RDF), a high calorific mix of paper, cardboard and plastics that is dried and pelletised.The second organic rich fraction is treated biologically, either aerobically or anaerobically. The main output of this stage is a ‘compost-like output’ (CLO).It’s like the alchemist trick of turning lead into gold, we have managed to turn black bag waste into fuel (RDF) and compost (CLO). Even better, about a third of the waste by weight typically disappears in the process.

But let’s take it to the next stage. What happens to these two promising sounding outputs?
Refuse derived fuel, in this time of high energy prices surely there is demand for this? Can it replace coal in boilers, factories, power plants? Unfortunately not as it turns out to be a fuel that nobody wants. Instead it must be sent to ..... incineration! Compost-like output, sounds promising. Can we spread it on farmland, grow plants in it? Unfortunately it turns out to be not much like compost after all, and can’t be used in agriculture or horticulture. Instead it must be sent to ....... landfill!

MBT is a rubbish way of handling rubbish. It’s a con, a quick fix sold by consultants to gullible Councils looking for a magic wand. Landfill bad, incineration bad, lets build an expensive MBT plant, process the waste and send it to landfill and incineration! Remember that impressive 30% weight reduction I mentioned earlier? That’s just simply due to water being lost as the waste is dried, no more. Proponents of MBT will no doubt point out that some materials are recovered. Ferrous materials are easily separated with overband magnets, but just as they are from the ash of incinerators. Some MBT plants will have picking stations where some poor souls will be standing pulling cardboard and some plastics from the filthy waste streaming past them on the belts.

But the truth of the matter is that MBT achieves virtually nothing. There is so little demand for the refuse derived fuel they produce that a prominent waste company recently had to seek permission to export 40,000 tonnes to Holland and Germany over the next 12 months. Other MBT operators may have to follow suit.So not only does waste sent to MBT end up in an incinerator, it ends up having to be transported half way across Europe before it can be burnt!
As the alchemists learnt, you can’t turn lead into gold. You can however create fool’s gold, an illusion that dirty commingled residual waste can somehow be converted by technology into something useful and worthwhile. It can’t.

Quick fixes and magic wands don’t work. Instead, responsible, professional waste management requires source separated collections of dry recyclables, an organic food waste stream and then thermal treatment of the residual waste to recover energy and render it inert.

So, after the dramas of Copenhagen, Climategate and election promises, the UK news has shifted its focus away the environment to deficit, tax increases and spending cuts. It’s a shame because I see sustainability as something that could create jobs, reduce costs through improved efficiency and protect us against possible environmental disasters caused by climate change.

But then again, media interest has always been fickle and often bears very little relationship to reality. The recent BP oil spill is a case in point. The damaged well is leaking 20 thousand barrels of oil every day, about 3,000 tonnes. It is billed as an environmental disaster, with American politicians falling over themselves to stick the boot into BP and to bash the Brits. There is no doubt that the leak is causing damage to the environment but let’s put that figure of 20,000 into perspective: the USA consumes nearly 20 million barrels of oil each and every day, including 9 million barrels of petrol. That’s one thousand times what is being spilt in the Gulf. All this oil is burnt to release CO2. The oil BP is spilling into the sea will be gone in a few years, naturally degraded by microbes, the CO2 being released into the atmosphere every day by the American economy is driving climate change and will be in the atmosphere for a hundred years.

The US reaction to the disaster is also out of proportion when you look at Nigeria, whose 606 oil fields supply 40% of all the crude oil the United States imports and is also the world capital of oil pollution. According to a recent Guardian report, more oil is spilled from the Niger Delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far. The figures are astounding but it gets no media attention. For 50 years people's livelihood and environments there have been damaged while oil companies act irresponsibility and with impunity but spills only get attention on US’s doorstep rather than faraway Africa.

The global outrage is also hypocritical as we all bear some responsibility. It is our collective demand for cheap oil that causes oil companies to cut corners, pay off officials and disregard local communities. As the satirical website Daily Mash helpfully pointed out, “Oil companies aren't pumping this stuff just so they can have it sitting around in buckets under their stairs”.
Until we can step back and address the root of the problem and look at sustainable alternatives, then problems like this will only continue. Current media interest in the spill makes this the perfect time for the US publicise a progressive green energy strategy. Instead it looks like they have decided to play the blame game and this will be just another missed opportunity.

The waste paper market is booming, with prices higher than any I have seen in my 20 years in the industry. Clean office papers at £220 per tonne and news & pam over £100 mean that the good times are back.

The dark days of Autumn 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the Chinese stopped buying paper seem a long time ago. Those were frightening times and I am sure that many people like me had sleepless nights worrying about their businesses.

Paper Round reacted quickly to the crisis . We laid off staff, trimming about 10% from our headcount. Employees accepted a pay freeze and our office staff agreed to work longer hours for the same pay. We re-examined every aspect of our business, streamlining business processes and taking out costs. The free monthly massage for staff was cancelled to everyone’s disappointment.

The result in 2009 was a business that was leaner, fitter, far more profitable and well placed to take advantage of the turnaround in the paper markets. We had our best ever year and the massages came back! This story will be readily understandable to MRW readers working in the private sector. To the public sector it might as well be from another planet. Public sector organisations have sailed on for the last 18 months bloated and inefficient, painful decisions postponed for as long as possible.

The Environment Agency is a key part of the public sector that many of us encounter in our professional lives. The Agency has 12,000 permanent staff and over 1,000 temporary staff and consultants (2008 Freedom of Information Request). This number has grown by 40% over the last 10 years. I have found the Environment Agency to be agonisingly slow, bureaucratic, box ticking and afraid to go after the real cowboys. Our site has an exemption from waste management licensing but we will still see someone a few times a year wielding their clipboard. They generally seek to find one minor thing to complain about (often incorrectly) and are then on their way.

Down the road, a tyre retreading business regularly burns off tyres and pallets. sending thick plumes of smoke into the air. We take pictures, we complain. Is anything done? Of course not. We make the EA staff a cup of tea, listen politely and do as we are told; the cowboys will set the dogs on them and order them off their property. This is too difficult and unpleasant, so they make up the quota of visits with the easy ones.

The Environment Agency is now facing job losses, as of course is the wider public sector. The normal response to this is the so called “bleeding stumps” strategy. You cut our budgets, we will close hospital wards, fire teaching assistants, close swimming pools, making the cuts as graphic and politically unacceptable as possible.

In 2008 I believed that Paper Round was an efficient company. But we still managed to cut 10% of our staff without affecting service quality in anyway. On the contrary, we ended up reducing bureaucracy, increasing efficiency and becoming even more focused on delivering excellent services to our customers.

I am sure this is true of most organisations and particularly in the public sector, where the last decade has seen huge increases in staff numbers and budgets. It will be perfectly possible to cut staff numbers by 10-20% and still provide an excellent service.

The Environment Agency is a vital part of our industry. We all need a strong efficient regulator to drive the cowboys out and provide an even legislative playing field. When the inevitable budget cuts and job losses start, they must not be focused on the bleeding stump of enforcement leaving the cowboys to run riot. Instead strip out the middle management, reduce the pointless form filling and preserve the key areas. Embrace the pain of the next few years to emerge, like the private sector has, re-energised and refocused on delivering value.

The carbon footprint of an orange set me thinking last week. Tesco’s have calculated that a Jaffa orange has a footprint of 130g CO2 (MRW 12/3/10). How is this interesting? Well in itself not particularly, but what was interesting I thought was that 80% of the footprint came from simply growing the fruit.

Just 2% came from the packaging. Time and time again packaging is demonstrated to be a very small component of a product’s overall carbon footprint and yet we keep focusing on it.
I understand that “Eat fewer oranges” is a much harder political message than declaring war on “over-packaging” or banning carrier bags!

But we mustn’t fool ourselves. Banning carrier bags will hardly make a scrap of difference to the environment and the idea that retailers routinely over-package goods is ridiculous.
It is human nature to seek an easy way out, a technological quick fix that will avoid the need for any behavioural change. A few years ago photo-degradable carrier bags were a solution. They would magically disappear when left in sunlight. This of course completely ignored the fact that bags would be buried in deep, dark landfills and if recycled would contaminate normal polythene. Now they are exposed (DEFRA report EV0422 March 2010) as bad for the environment and bad for recycling.

Food miles were last year’s thing. Surely it’s obvious that English tomatoes are better than Spanish ones trucked across Europe? Well no actually. English greenhouses have supplemental gas heating, Spanish ones don’t. Surely it’s obvious that green beans shouldn’t be flown in from Kenya? Well no, it keeps thousands of African farmers in work and provides Kenya with a vital source of foreign exchange.

When I first started in the industry there was a very simple message: Reduce – Reuse – Recycle.

This surely is still the key message that we should be focusing on. When you stray outside of it messages become confused, conflicting evidence emerges and the risk is that the public throw up their hands and give up.

That’s why I love WRAP’s Love Food Hate Waste campaign. It’s simple and focuses on Reduce. It’s not “Eat fewer oranges,” but “Buy fewer oranges”. This has a far bigger impact than focusing on packaging and transport.

Reuse is an area that receives too little attention. It’s more product specific, it can mess up supply chains and introduces quality control problems. But reusing a product just once has the potential to halve its carbon footprint. We should all be thinking about innovative ideas to reuse products (1001 uses for a carrier bag?).

Recycle. We are back on more familiar territory. It’s all about weight based targets. Just get it out of the black bags and we claim our credits.

But remember our orange. After production, waste disposal at 8% was the second largest number. This is true of many products. Our decisions on recycling routes are important and have real environmental impacts.

Let’s take glass. Commingled glass recycling is a con isn’t it? It isn’t recycling at all, it’s stopping glass from going from one hole in the ground (landfill), and rather trucking it miles to throw it in another hole (construction site aggregate). It’s pretend recycling, it’s a sham. I am amazed the Daily Mail hasn’t picked up on it!

Commingled recycling is another technological fix that seeks to avoid behaviour change. It will be exposed in the end for what it is.

My plea is that we keep our messages to the public simple, focusing on the 4R’s
Reduce – Reuse – Real Recycle.

All this from an orange!

Last month Defra confirmed what I have been going on about for years: that oxo-degradable carrier bags now used by many supermarkets are not a sustainable solution (DEFRA report EV0422 March 2010). The purpose of the bags is to help retailers be more environmentally friendly without needing to change customer behaviour. Tesco has used degradable bags since 2004 and claims that all its ‘free carrier bags are made from degradable plastic, which means they break down in just 18 months – leaving nothing that could harm the environment’. The research disputes this, saying that far from being better, they may actually be detrimental to the environment. It identifies the material as being way off the mark as an environmental solution for a number of reasons.

Firstly, these bags break down when exposed to sunlight. I was in Syria recently where they had a major litter problem caused mainly by plastic bags. There oxo-degradable bags would definitely help minimise the problem due to the large amount of sun they have. However, here in the UK not only do we insufficient sunlight but the majority of waste is buried as landfill, where it will never see the sun and therefore not breakdown.

Secondly, most supermarkets now have recycling bins for customers to bring back their unwanted plastic bags. This would be a good example of closed loop recycling. However, mixing normal plastic bags and photo-degradable ones causes problems back at the recycling plant because the latter could potentially degrade in long-life products made from recycled plastics, such as construction materials or garden furniture.

Finally, the research also states that oxo-degradable plastics should not be used in composting either because of plastics fragments which remain after the degrading process could have a negative impact for the quality and retail value of the compost.
It is human nature to seek an easy way out, a technological quick fix that will avoid the need for any behavioural change. However, this example shows that when it comes to the environment, we should be deeply suspicious of magic wand solutions that require no effort or behaviour change. While I do think that technology should play a key role in helping us become a more sustainable society, solutions need to be fully assessed as to their real value before going mainstream.

This plastic bag case is particularly irritating because consumers are showing that they want to do the right thing – people are prepared to pay a premium for degradable bin bags and bring bags back to be recycled. Instead this shows supermarkets jumping ahead, trying to impress customers with easy environmental solutions before actually looking into the full implications. These organisations wield a lot of power and are experts in influencing customer purchasing decisions. If they can present their customers with solutions that are genuinely sustainable rather than PR ops, then we could start seeing some real progress.

On the face of it, Mayor Boris Johnson’s Waste Strategy 2010's plan to send all non-recyclable waste zero-to-landfill within fifteen years is good news. It also aims to dramatically improve London environmental performance by bringing the city's recycling rate up from 25% to 45% by 2015. Among the measures outlined are improvements for householders living in flats– dwellings which fare particularly poorly on recycling – and the development of waste disposal techniques to avoid rising Landfill Tax rates. Again, sensible solutions and which as a resident of this city I welcome.

However, beyond the ambitious targets and the Mayor’s starry-eyed vision that “London becomes the best big city on earth” (!?!), the actual means of achieving the strategy appear to have some serious flaws.

The strategy is divided into Municipal Waste Management Strategy (MWMS) and Business Waste Strategy (BWS) (the latter to be published later this year), which makes sense as the two have different sets of problems. However, the main problem I have with it is that in the MWMS defines municipal waste as "the household waste and business waste collected by local authorities". This is because business waste should not be included in this category and there are several reasons why.

Firstly, councils can offer waste services cheaper than private providers. While this may get more businesses recycling, the actual reason it’s cheaper or free is because it is being subsidised by council tax. This is an instance where on face value the strategy is voter friendly and talks about reducing the burden of Landfill Tax on council tax payers, while doing the exact opposite. I have even had customers cancel Paper Round's services because their council is now offering them free recycling. They say you can’t argue with free but in this case it is by no means free and council tax payers are picking up the bill.

Secondly, as the owner of a recycling company, councils collecting from businesses worry me. Bringing in subsidised services into direct competition with the private sector is non-competitive; the public sector should not be competing against private service providers. There are a whole host of capable recycling companies in the capital that collect from businesses, the council should focus on household waste alone. With some councils recycling as little as 15%, it’s not like there isn’t enough work for them to do there.

Thirdly, I fully agree with the part of the report that prioritises reducing the amount of waste generated. Again though, providing businesses with cheap waste services does not incentivise them to reduce the amount of waste they produce. Unless it has a significant impact on their bottom line, businesses will not change their ways.

Lastly, collecting from businesses will also boost tonnage for councils, so that they will appear to be improving their recycling targets without having to implement any real changes to more problematic areas such as facilities for householders in flats.

So for now, despite Boris' lofty ambitions for the Capital, until he starts understanding some of the problems of combining household and business waste collections, I don’t think we’ll see any real improvements. Instead it stands to harm council tax payers, private sector waste companies and of course, the environment.

So, Copenhagen is over, ending unsurprisingly with weak resolutions and a lack of specific or legally-binding targets. Amongst the few things that were agreed, however, was a commitment to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2°C. Quite how this will be carried out though is still undecided; developed and developing countries continue to accuse each other of hidden agendas and unrealistic demands.

One area in which developed and developing countries are both meant to benefit is through the concept of carbon credits, sold through the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This scheme enables developed countries to offset their emissions by stimulating the use of cleaner technology in developing countries. This has the potential to transfer large sums of money into promoting low carbon technologies in the third world, surely a great idea?

In theory yes, but in reality huge and fatal flaws have appeared. This is because it is so difficult to prove that the money has gone to support schemes that would genuinely not have happened without it (“additionality” in the jargon). China has secured over half the market and it is a big market, China has received over $1 billion through the sale of carbon credits. Serious accusations have now been made that China has manipulated this market by, amongst other things, setting the domestic subsidy of wind farms deliberately low to ensure that they need international carbon credit support to be viable.

Friends of the Earth have said for years that offset was a con, but I always rather clung onto the hope that investing in third world energy efficiency projects was a valid way to reduce global CO2 levels. Now I think that FoE is right. Offset between countries is just too difficult to get right and is wide open to abuse.

Offsets are a red herring. We in the developing world have to get on with reducing our own emissions as time is fast running out...

The latest Daily Mail campaign to catch my eye and provoke my frustration is their championing of our ‘beloved’ incandescent lightbulb in its latest bid to protect the interests of the good British people from the evils of modernisation and EU directives.

Maybe more than usual though is the utter ridiculousness of this campaign. The inefficiency of the lightbulb is common knowledge, I remember my physics teacher demonstrating it as an example of great inefficiency when I was at school. Technology has moved on and can now offer us a better solution to our lighting needs but the Daily Mail wants none of it. At a time when energy efficiency and sustainability is paramount, the paper has decided that the poor incandescent bulb is a victim of a nanny state that is there to rob us of… er, high electricity bills and climate chaos?

Also, on the scale of environmental improvements versus effort, using low-energy alternatives is hardly a big step change. Once you fitted it, you can operate just as you did before only now you are using up to 75% less energy. They also last longer, so technically they require even less effort as you have to change them less often.

As well as the energy saving, while the initial cost of a single bulb may be higher the fact they cost less to operate and last longer means the end user saves money. If the Mail’s poor ‘unnamed panic buyer’ actually stopped their manic stockpiling for one second to do the maths, they might see that replacing their seven 100W bulbs they currently use could save them £49 per year. The Mail actually gives these figures in their article but fails to make the connection.

The articles are also largely in the dark about the developments of low-efficiency bulbs, which have come a long way in the last 10 years. There is now a full range of bulbs available, including ones for halogen and dimmer lamps. Also, though they do contain mercury, the levels are so low that it would only become a health risk if you locked yourself in an unventilated room and smashed lots of bulbs while inhaling deeply.

What is so frustrating is that they could have equally flipped the story the other way and used it as an opportunity to inform poor Mrs Spottiswood that buying low energy bulbs would not only help bring down the cost of her electricity bills now but will also help prevent future climate chaos where extreme winter and summer weather would see heating and cooling bills soar to unprecedented levels. There you go, it still has all the elements of a good Daily Mail story - dash of scaremongering as well as a personal touch but now it has a good green message as well.

I promised myself that I would take a break from ranting about the problems of mixed recycling but articles keep appearing that make it impossible: In May, waste management company Viridor were ordered to pay £110,000 for illegal waste exports and then on Friday BBC reported 1,400 tonnes of UK hazardous waste imported to Brazil as plastics for recycling. While Viridor have been fined by the Environment Agency, two UK companies, named as Worldwide Biorecyclables and UK Multiplas Recycling, are under investigation for the Brazil incident.

These events show an arrogant disrespect for the rest of the world, with a ‘let someone else sort out’ attitude and again highlight the pitfalls of commingled recycling. If materials going into a MRF are clean, they can be easily sorted into their different types, baled and sold on as a valuable resource. However, a MRF cannot perform magic; if material going into it is heavily contaminated then there is no way clean separate materials will come out.

Events like the Viridor’s should be reported more widely to raise awareness about the problems of throwing recycling together in one bag. Some of Paper Round’s clients leave us for recycling companies that offer do comingled collections because it’s easy, requires no staff training and allows the company to tick the environmental box. This is depressing as I feel it’s missing the point of recycling and again takes an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach.

I have however been encouraged by WRAP’s recent report, which firmly supports source-separated recycling as it increases the likelihood of ‘closed loop recycling’ and better meets reprocessor and end market requirements. Paper Round has always been a strong supporter of source-separated recycling and the report has reassured again me that this way is still the right way both environmentally and economically.