Some 75% of UK household waste is sent to landfill, with packaging accounting for 25% of this waste. With landfill sites rapidly filling up, we have two options: we can use less packaging or we can recycle more. Catherine Sleep looks at a new report that examines the problems of recycling packaging in the UK and makes ambitious recommendations for policymakers and food and packaging manufacturers.
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Although the recycling of packaging in the UK has increased by approximately 10% since 2000, the UK still lags behind the majority of European countries. Food and drink packaging is a significant focus for the problem, and an area in which manufacturers, retailers, policymakers and consumers have a part to play. A new report commissioned by Tetra Pak and produced by the educational charity Forum for the Future gives some pointers that could help us all do a lot better.
UK household waste has increased by 15% in the last five years, as Jonathan Porritt, programme director of Forum for the Future and chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, told a gathering of industry delegates last week. An embarrassing three quarters of this is sent to landfill, compared with 50% in France and just 7% in Switzerland. The UK’s domestic waste recycling performance is improving, but it is still near the bottom of the European Union recycling league (14.5% in 2003, compared with Austria 58%, Germany 53% and the Netherlands 59%).
Packaging makes up 25% of the 13-15 million tonnes of household waste that goes to landfill in the UK each year. Last year the UK managed to recycle 47% of this packaging, behind most other EU countries. It was the only country that failed to meet the EU packaging recovery target of 55%.
It’s economics, stupid
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By GlobalDataThere are a number of barriers to progress, as the report indicates. For many local authorities, the economics simply don’t add up. There are insufficient economic incentives to encourage authorities to implement radical recycling initiatives. Landfill and incineration are still the cheapest disposal options. For example, the landfill tax in the UK is just £13 (US$23.4) per tonne compared with £34 per tonne in Denmark. As Friends of the Earth points out, incineration currently has more tax breaks than recycling.
Furthermore, weight-based waste collection targets for local authorities hamper the recovery of lightweight packaging. Weight-based targets encourage authorities to go for heavier collectables such as glass, paper and green waste, while lightweight packaging such as plastic and aluminium is neglected.
The bias towards heavy materials has led to questionable outcomes. For example, the UK is currently exporting over a million tonnes of recovered paper as far as China because there is too much of it for UK markets, and importing recovered aluminium to keep the UK aluminium recycling industry going. In 2003, Alcan, the UK market leader, bought 10,000 tonnes of aluminium cans recovered from the UK and had to import 45,000 tonnes from all over the world. Yet three out of four aluminium cans consumed in the UK (about 3.25 billion cans) were sent to landfill or incineration (Source: Based on conversation with Paul Williams, Alcan, August 2004). According to Alcan, recycling aluminium cans saves up to 95% of the energy needed to make cans from raw materials,
Other forms of lightweight packaging, such as liquid cartons, are hardly collected at all. In 2003, only 2% of liquid cartons were recycled in the UK, according to Tetra Pak estimates, while the average for the EU was 30% (Source: Unpublished data from Tetra Pak).
Lack of infrastructure
Kerbside collection increases recycling rates dramatically, but there is a lack of infrastructure to encourage an increase. An Environment Agency survey revealed that only 6% of people in the UK claimed to recycle plastic, but this figure rose to 59% in areas where the council provides containers and doorstep collection.
Even if the will and wherewithal to collect more materials for recycling were in place, there is a lack of reprocessing facilities in the UK, and if local facilities are not available, then the additional impact of higher CO2 emissions from increased transport has to be taken into consideration.
Public awareness takes commitment
Polls indicated that the public tends to see recycling as a worthwhile activity but one shrouded in confusion. People feel unsure about which materials can be recycled and need to be encouraged to find out more and to reduce, recycle or re-use packaging materials. To this end, the government’s has launched a £10m multimedia campaign to motivate the public and improve awareness of recycling, fronted by celebrities such as Matthew Pinsent and Eddie Izzard.
More punitive measures may be in the pipeline in years to come. The UK uses 500 million plastic bags each week. A tax on plastic bags in Ireland of about ten pence per bag has resulted in a 90% reduction. Such measures sound draconian but the results are impressive.
Lack of government leadership
The Forum for the Future report slams a lack of joined-up thinking between the packaging industry, packer-fillers and retailers as to how to move towards a sustainable packaging industry. This is exacerbated by little government leadership. Local authorities do not share best practice in an efficient manner, and they are beholden to unhelpful targets which do not help them to move in the direction of sustainable resource management.
There is a dearth of systematic data gathering which impedes progress on recycling, the report claims. A 2003 review of the packaging market by the Packaging Federation suggested that there is also some fraudulent use of Packaging Recovery Notes resulting in reduced financial contributions.
Where do we go from here?
Forum for the Future calls for a long-term vision of sustainable packaging and resource use developed through stakeholder dialogue, supported by scientific research. More specifically, central government has to provide clear and consistent leadership, shaping the markets in the right way and incentivising behaviour towards sustainable resource use. Interestingly, the report recommends that central government devolve more power to local authorities, as they do not currently have the right incentives and flexibility to manage waste streams sustainably, taking into account different local conditions and facilities.
The report also calls on the government to reform the landfill tax into a waste disposal tax that reflects the waste hierarchy and makes landfill and incineration the most expensive disposal options. This process would need leadership from the Treasury. In concrete terms, the first step would be immediately to raise the tax on landfill by at least £6 per tonne, aiming to reach tax levels of other progressive European countries by 2008 (at least £35 per tonne). In a second step, a tax would be introduced on incineration. Combined with this, the report suggests that the Treasury ring-fence and reinvest the proceeds of the waste disposal tax in waste reduction, re-use and recycling technologies and infrastructure.
Variable charging for households
To encourage people to recycle materials to the best of their ability, the report recommends that local authorities be vested with the power to charge households in accordance with their recycling efforts and overall waste generation. Such schemes are already common practice in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. One danger is that such a scheme encourages fly-tipping, so efforts would have to be made to counteract that. Practice has shown that more people will get involved in recycling if it is made convenient for them, so doorstep collection needs to be stepped up where possible.
The Household and Waste Recycling Act will commit local authorities to providing every household in England with a separate collection of at least two types of recyclable materials by 2010. This is a step in the right direction but the report recommends that all local authorities should provide separate collection of dry recyclables by 2010 and introduce doorstep collection of organic waste where home composting is not a feasible option.
Challenge to the packaging industry, manufacturers and retailers
Forum for the Future argues that the packaging industry has a key role to play in both improving recycling and making the shift from a waste economy towards a sustainable resource economy. Importantly, packaging producers need to share responsibilities (e.g. collection and segregation, building consumer awareness) with other stakeholders, such as local authorities, waste management companies and retailers.
Packaging producers and food and drink manufacturers need to work on robust sustainability principles and work towards using the minimum packaging required to get the product to the consumer undamaged with minimum environmental impact. Packer-fillers can influence the packaging market through their buying power. Ultimately they decide what type of packaging is being used for their products. If manufacturers demand sustainable packaging, this will help the market develop. Messages on-pack can also raise consumer awareness.
Retailers meanwhile can influence the same issues through their own-label lines, and use these to promote sustainable packaging. One example of reducing packaging is to sell snack bars held together by a simple sticky strip rather than in a cardboard box. Retailers can also use their loyalty schemes to encourage re-use or recycling.
Profits will not drive recycling
A salient point was made by one of the speakers at last week’s gathering, Ken Orchard of the progressive not-for-profit company Mid Devon Community Recycling. He argued that local authorities need to stop viewing recycling as a source of income, and should view it instead as a service, like refuse collection or street cleaning. These are not expected to generate revenue, and neither should recycling. Take away the need to make money, and you take away the barriers to recycling lightweight materials. In his view, something as important as the environment should not be left to people whose main aim is to make a profit. It is hard to disagree with him.
To download a copy of the full report from Forum of the Future, click here.
