Green Bill of Health

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.

Protests over incineration are really starting to annoy me. Whether it’s placard holders at planned sites or raised eyebrows in client meetings when I announce that Paper Round, now collects waste for incineration; Incineration is still a dirty word.

The incineration argument has been misdirected as it is continually being pitched against recycling when it should actually be against landfill. I do strongly believe that recycling rates need to do be raised dramatically but I’m also realistic that even if we do achieve targets set out in EU directives that we will still be producing a large amount of non-recyclable waste that needs to be dealt with effectively.

The much more pressing problem is that the UK is still sending 65% of its waste to landfill, whose pollution may not be as conspicuous as an incinerator but is bad news nonetheless due to the amount of methane it produces – a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Modern Energy from Waste (EfW) facilities on the other hand are now put through rigorous testing to dramatically reduce emissions, while turning unusable waste into a fuel source.

The suggestion that waste companies favour incineration over recycling, however, makes no sense at all because recycling is still way ahead of incineration environmentally and financially. If a council or waste company sends waste to landfill or incineration they have to pay for disposal whereas if they take it to a recycling plant they will make money. So it makes complete sense to achieve maximum recycling rates both at the front end the scheme by educating those recycling and as it goes to the plant to insure pure materials.

I think we need to look at how some of our European neighbours manage to combine incineration with enviably high recycling rates to help us achieve an effective and more sustainable solution to our waste disposal.

As the economic downturn continues to grip office procurement budgets, I’m seeing more and more businesses opt for the cheaper service of mixed or comingled recycling. This saddens me as I see it as a step back from all the genuine progress that has been made in recycling in the past few years. Mixing materials together may seem like the easier option but it dramatically reduces its quality and its resell and environmental value.

In light of this, I was delighted when Camden Council announced a dramatic U-turn on its recycling collections. After an extensive environmental audit last year, it has decided to go with a ‘twin stream’ option rather than the comingled method it uses currently because the audit claimed that the separation of paper and cardboard from other dry recyclables would significantly improve the carbon efficiency of the local authority's collections.

Twin stream recycling collects paper and card in one container and glass, cans and plastics in another. It is a realistic and effective way to collect recycling as it uncomplicated and also maintains the quality of the materials. This is particularly relevant to paper recycling, as shards of glass damage pulping machinery or liquid left in glass and plastic bottles can make it rotten and unusable. It is far better than comingled collections as it satisfies the requirements both of those collecting by preserving the quality of the materials and those recycling as the two containers require very little extra work or thought, even for the laziest recycler.

It’s good to see a council acting intelligently and sticking to their guns when it comes to the environment. They have not taken the easy option by resigning to comingled recycling with the excuse that it is what people want and it is just there to service their needs. Instead they have taken into account that though people are willing to recycle, they also want a hassle-free service and integrated it into a scheme that does not compromise its own environmental ethics. Camden Council has set a very good example by taking this step, I just hope that other councils and businesses will follow its lead and achieve genuine environmental results by supporting real recycling.

Despite last week's snow, the daffodils I’ve seen popping up give me hope that after a dark, cold winter, spring is finally on its way. I'm also pleased to see that there have been some green shoots of hope in the recycling markets.

After the dramatic crashes of last autumn, prices that stabilised in January have made a few tentative increases. According to WRAP, these positive developments suggest the long term market outlook is starting turn. The per tonne prices of white paper, mixed paper and cardboard have all gone up £5-10. Slight these maybe, but in the light of how badly they fell they most certainly offer some kind of hope that recovery is on the horizon.

There are still concerns about volatility in certain markets, China is buying again but its market still remains fragile due to the global economic slowdown, putting cardboard, metal and plastic prices as risk.

The good news is that there has been an increase the demand for paper, which is helping to stabilise prices. Once again, I have all sorts of people calling me wanting to buy my waste paper. This is due to strong demand from UK paper mills and for export to Europe and India.

The increases are not big enough for us relax just yet and I’m under no illusion that they’ll get back to summer 2008 prices in a hurry but they are definitely significant and do offer hope for a good recovery.

Funnily enough, despite all the coverage that recycling had in mainstream press during the crash I’ve seen very little about this in the media, showing how much just how much bad news sells and but loses all interest when situations improve. In this case then, it’s safe to say to say that no news is good news.

Since last week the news has been full of dramatic pictures and stories of how the UK has dealt with the heaviest snow in 18 years. However, as it goes on I’ve become increasingly worried about our complete inability to deal with it all. We’re a nation obsessed with the weather; you’d think that was one area we’d have covered.

Yesterday, a BBC forecaster reported "There will be heavy-lying snow by tomorrow morning - up to 5cm (2in) of snow generally but we could see 10cm in some places and 15cm (6in) on higher ground."

Take a second to look beyond the prospect of being snowed in and actually look at the figures. We’re talking about 2 inches, 6 if you unlucky enough to live on a hill! We are a country in Northern Europe and it’s the middle of winter – why has it caused such chaos? He also goes on to mention that it was the coldest in Inverness-shire since 2003. While -18C is very cold, 2003 was not that long ago, so why are we so unprepared? Many of our European neighbours manage to cope just fine without panic and hysteria.

Though granted it has snowed more than usual, most years we do get some sort of snow but each time we seem to be caught unawares. Initially, it was lots of fun – school and work was called off as people headed out for snowball fights and sledging. However, the charm and amusement has given way to plain embarrassment as airports shut and the country was crippled due to our failure to deal with the snow and ice effectively.

Having an extra long weekend seemed like a blessing to many but millions of people not coming into work is just about the worst thing the economy needs right now. I’m lucky enough to have a workforce of predominantly Eastern European drivers who seemed unfazed by the snow. We had a full fleet out to do our usual 300-odd jobs but over 80 companies were closed. If almost every other country in Northern Europe seems to be able to get by with much more snow, surely it’s not so much the snow that crippled us but our inability to respond effectively. There is something very British about the whole thing but in the current economic climate there is no way we can afford to be so inadequate.

Also, if climate change is causing weather to become more extreme, then we need to hurry up and put in place necessary infrastructure and procedures to deal with unpredictable and volatile conditions or risk going under every time the weather takes a turn for the worse.

The recent cold snap and continued economic downturn brought the festivities to an abrupt halt and made us all wake up to the grim fact that 2009 looks set to be a very tough year. And with household names closing branches, cutting jobs or calling in administrators, just getting through it as a business will be an achievement in itself.

Because of this, most businesses are now reviewing their operations – contracts, suppliers, travel etc - are all being slimmed down to reduce their bottom line. This is a logical solution to the downturn but unfortunately I’ve noticed that increasingly green endeavours, such as recycling and carbon footprint reduction, do not make it through as they are deemed expendable and superfluous.

While there is no denying the severity of the economic downturn, we do need to remember that the threat of climate change does still exist and efforts like recycling and carbon reduction should not be viewed as luxuries only to be indulged in when times are good. When we do emerge from the recession, the problems of climate problems will still be there.

While over-use of carbon offset is most definitely characteristic of the good times - a product that let us pay to carry on as we were guilt-free – we mustn’t lose sight of the actual progress that has been made. Excluding genuine green actions from this year’s budgets will only send us backwards. Instead, these business shake ups should be used as an opportunity to do away with expensive, showy gestures and go back to the basics of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Simple actions such as switching to efficient lighting and timers, reviewing business travel and recycling may sound trivial but will improve your bottom line immediately and will do the rare thing of pleasing both your finance and CSR departments.

…And now for some good news: Last month, an Environment Agency report announced that almost a quarter less waste was sent to landfill in 2007 than in 2001. Thanks to the Landfill Tax, the amount of waste sent to landfill has been impressively reduced and the UK looks set to achieve 2010 targets to reduce the pollution potential from landfill, laid out in the EU Landfill Directive.

The report shows that in 2001, the year before the Directive came into effect in England and Wales, around 84 million tonnes of waste was sent to landfill but last year the figure stood at 65 million tonnes – an impressive drop of 23%.

News on recycling and waste so often focuses the negative – we’re not recycling enough, people will get fined for not recycling etc - that most media failed to pick up on the story. However, it is stories like this that need to be publicised with more emphasis because they demonstrate to all those filling up their bins at home and in the office that recycling does make a difference and should encourage them to recycle even more.

The aim of the tax is to encourage recycling by increasing the cost of disposing in landfill. This year’s budget increased the tax by £8 to £32 per tonne and plans to do the same again each coming year. This strengthens the environmental incentive for recycling by adding a financial one, as waste companies pass on this increase to their clients. Businesses in particular are aware of rising waste disposal costs and are now recycling more to avoid them.

Unlike other taxes that try to achieve a Government objective but fail to make any impact, this is a truly progressive policy that is working and really making a difference. Call me a cynic but somehow, I don’t have quite the same confidence for the success of new VAT reform.