Examination of witnesses (Questions 692
- 699)
TUESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2000
MR JOHN
TURNER and MS
JANE BICKERSTAFFE
Chairman
692. Can I welcome you to the third session
this morning? Could I ask you to identify yourselves for the record,
please?
(Mr Turner) My name is John Turner. I am chief executive
of Valpak, one of the 15 or so compliance schemes dealing with
packaging regulations.
(Ms Bickerstaffe) I am Jane Bickerstaffe. I am director
of INCPEN, which is the Industry Council for Packaging in the
Environment. We are a research body that was established in 1974
to look at the social and environmental impact of packaging. That
is still our main remit today.
693. Do either of you want to say anything by
way of introduction or are you happy to go straight to questions?
(Mr Turner) I will be happy to deal with questions.
Chairman: Can I stress that if you disagree
with each other please speak but if you agree then there is no
need to say anything at all.
Christine Butler
694. How far have the packaging regulations
reduced the total amount of packaging waste and increasing recycling
and recovery of waste?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) For companies' own waste, I think
they have had an impact because they have made companies measure
how much packaging they are handling. Just the house keeping aspects
of that have encouraged them to reduce the waste there. In terms
of the waste that comes through to the municipal waste stream,
I am not sure that there has been that much effect, partly because
commercial drivers and environmental attention have reduced the
amount of material used in each pack coming through into the municipal
waste stream.
695. Are there any figures which show a difference
between the household packaging waste on the one hand and the
commercial packaging waste on the other?
(Mr Turner) There are about 9.2 million tonnes of
packaging waste circulating in the United Kingdom.
696. Is this a total figure?
(Mr Turner) Yes. About 4.6 million tonnes of that
are domestic waste and about 4.6 or 5 million tonnes of that are
industrial waste. The majority of recycling that takes place at
the moment is in commercial and industrial waste because it is
driven by economic factors. The packaging regulations in the United
Kingdom have the benefit for those involved in dealing with all
packaging, not only domestic packaging. A comment was made earlier
on about European schemes. Quite a number of other European schemes
only deal with domestic packaging. Therefore, the commercial and
industrial waste is not collected so it goes to landfill.
697. Have you modelled future projections so
that you might be able to tell us if these figures will look better
in a year or two's time or worse? What is the trend?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) One of the things we did as INCPEN
was manage the first sorting of household waste to identify the
packaging component in 1980. Then we got involved with an Environment
Agency national survey in 1997 and the striking thing about that
is that the packaging fraction in the waste stream is probably
pretty stable. If anything, it had gone down a bit. There are
a number of reasons for that: commercial drivers on each pack
but also substitution of lighter weight materials for the heavier
ones. The other thing that is strikingly different is that people
were throwing away quite different things 30 years ago. In the
1980s, we never saw books, children's toys or things like that
in the waste stream. Even more unpleasantly, we never saw syringes.
You see them in 1997 waste.
698. Are they packaged? Have you done work so
that you can project the trend? Is it better for us or going to
be worse for us?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) We have not looked forward but looking
back packaging has stayed pretty stable. The odds are it will
continue to because of all the drivers, because of the regulations,
because of the commercial drivers to reduce it as well.
(Mr Turner) There is a movement around between materials
as well. As time goes on, different technologies emerge and different
materials become appropriate for different markets. Therefore,
there is a switch around between the two. If you take some of
the common packaging materials, steel and aluminium are very flat
at the moment and there is very little growth in those materials.
There is growth in plastic and there is some growth in paper,
but there are not exponential growth patterns in any of these
materials. The amount of work that has been done over the last
ten years in taking weight out of packaging, the big volume packaging—drinks
cans and drinks bottles—is enormous. An aluminium can not
so long ago probably weighed nearly 20 grams. It now weighs about
11 grams. There has been a huge reduction and that has been driven
by improvements in the technology.
699. Would you like to say anything about the
regulations as they exist now and how you could see betterment
there?
(Mr Turner) It depends how you look at these regulations.
There has been a lot of criticism of the packaging regulations
but you have to look at it in the broad. If you compare the United
Kingdom position with other European schemes, if you just take
for example on an economic front, by the end of 2001, the first
session of five years of the regulations in the United Kingdom,
we may spend £150 million to £200 million on recycling
activities of packaging. The Germans, on the other hand, are spending
something like 1.1 billion on recovering and recycling packaging
and are obviously operating at much higher levels. They are up
at the 80 per cent mark. They are only targeting one particularly
expensive part of the stream and that is domestic packaging. They
did that for their own reasons. They have been doing that for
ten years. The regulations in the United Kingdom have only been
in operation for three years. What we have achieved in that time
is increased recovery and recycling from three million tonnes
up to 3.7 million tonnes and we will by the end of next year,
provided that we have a bit of luck, achieve the 50 per cent target
set by the European Directive, not the German Directive.
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