Examination of witnesses (Questions 700
- 719)
TUESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2000
MR JOHN
TURNER and MS
JANE BICKERSTAFFE
Chairman
700. As far as the domestic market is concerned,
no impact at all?
(Mr Turner) No, that is not true. A lot of domestic
packaging is collected. There are about 700,000 tonnes of domestic
packaging already collected. There are something like 6.5 million
households engaged on kerbside collection or bring systems and
there is a rapid increase going to take place in the next year
or so because of the increase in targets being set by the government
which we expect to have announced today.
Christine Butler
701. Does the United Kingdom's packaging obligation
give sufficient direct incentive to manufacturers in ensuring
a reduction of packaging waste?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) That has happened regardless of
the regulations. An interesting comparison with Germany is we
may not recycle quite as much from the domestic waste stream as
they do but the definitions of their waste stream are different.
It is not as bad as it looks. According to the European Commission's
own figures, we put less packaging per capita on the market in
the United Kingdom than they do in Germany, so we are starting
from a lower base of packaging than they do.
702. Do you think there is an incentive there
to improve design for recycling?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) Design for resource efficiency is
where the effort is going now.
703. Is it not the same thing?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) Not really. There are some containers
that it is sensible to try and recycle. They tend to be the heavier
ones because you have more material there. It is sensible to make
them as recyclable as possible. There are other types of pack,
multi-material packaging and things like that, which are very
difficult to recycle, but they have environmental virtues further
up the distribution chain by allowing you to pack more product
in the back of a lorry and have fewer lorries on the road. That
is why it is important to take the whole overview and design the
whole system for resource efficiency rather than possibly just
recycling or just using materials for minimal input.
Chairman
704. How easy is it to demonstrate that life
expectancy from a product? There was a programme, was there not,
that the Environment Agency was producing? How many people actually
use that to really check out whether the claims you have just
made are acceptable or not? You were claiming that the whole life
of a product should be taken into account rather than just one
snapshot of the product. How easy is it to demonstrate that per
product, per packaging?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) You do not need to do lifecycle
analyses. They are extremely complex things and, you are right,
many companies will not go to the expense, time and trouble to
do it. We were involved 20 years ago when the energy crisis was
forcing companies to look at their use of energy. That triggered
an awful lot of reduction in material use and energy use. The
way that that worked was just mass flows. You can look at the
materials and energy that go into a system and the materials and
energy that comes out. We have many reports. We are doing a study
at the moment with a Dutch professor looking at the environmental
impact of households, both in terms of what they buy so that includes
the packaging around goods and in terms of the energy that has
gone into the products that they buy and their energy use in the
houses themselves, eg running a washing machine. We can provide
some clear advice for consumers on what steps they can take to
reduce their overall environmental impact.
Christine Butler
705. Are you suggesting that market forces play
a big role in all of this?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) Yes.
706. What about a tax on primary resources to
provide an even greater incentive?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) I think that is something that society
as a whole needs to look at. There seems a lot of sense in taxing
resources rather than labour. That is a bigger issue than we are
talking about here, but I agree. We should be looking at the big
issues to try and make real reductions in resource use.
707. Mr Turner, we should be directing taxation
at primary resources rather than at labour and making tax on labour
lighter. Is that what you would—?
(Mr Turner) Primary resources? Could you expand on
what you mean?
Chairman: The idea is that we ask the questions.
Mr Brake
708. You referred to the targets for obligated
parties. Do you support the increase in the target recently announced?
Was it what you anticipated?
(Mr Turner) The targets have been expanding since
the beginning and since 1997 have been gradually lifting. What
we have said about this latest increase in targets is that it
is too late and it is too much. We do not know what the government
has finally decided to do because it has not been announced. The
difficulty for industry at this very late, stage, bearing in mind
that we only have one year left to achieve the 50 per cent, is
to do this at the last minute. In all this discussion about waste
recycling, you must remember that to get initiatives going it
takes some time. In a lot of these things, local authorities and
waste management companies are looking for longer term contracts,
so to come up with a rapid increase in targets at the last minute
makes it extremely difficult. Having said that, we do not disagree
that targets need to increase because the problem we have had
with the United Kingdom system since the beginning—and it
has been due to an excess of supply over demand of the packaging
recovery notes—has meant that not sufficient money has flowed
into the chain over the last three years and therefore has created
a problem at the last minute. What will happen is the cost to
industry will go up rapidly next year to compensate for the lack
of investment over the last two years.
709. You say you have one year to achieve 50
per cent. What are you on currently?
(Mr Turner) There are about 3.6 million to 3.7 million
tonnes being recovered and collected at the moment. We do not
know the final figures for last year. We have to do about 4.6
million tonnes. There is another million tonnes to do, which is
more than we have done so far in the last three years. We have
legal obligations to do this. We have about 60 per cent of the
market in Valpak. We have plans in position to deliver the 700,000
tonnes. We will deliver them.
710. Presumably, as an organisation, you are
cracking open bottles of champagne with higher targets because
you will be benefiting financially?
(Mr Turner) We do not have enough money to crack open
bottles of champagne unfortunately. We are a non-profit making
organisation owned by our members. 3,000 United Kingdom companies
are members of ours. We are basically facilitators—or we
have been to this point—but we are now taking a direct interventionist
approach into material acquisition by engaging with over 100 local
authorities. We are going to put another 6,500 bring banks on
the ground next year and engage with about 15,000 retail outlets
to collect material, because we will have to do it to get the
job done in the last year. We will be cracking maybe one bottle
of champagne at the end of next year when we finally comply with
the 2001 requirement, but this is only the beginning of course
because the European Directive at the moment is being reviewed
currently. There is a high likelihood that the targets will increase
rapidly and cause even more cost and challenge to industry to
meet them. It is absolutely clear that the cost to industry will
continue to increase to enable these targets to be met.
711. Can you tell us how much money you are
investing in terms of the development of the infrastructure that
will be needed?
(Mr Turner) Yes. By the end of next year, it is forecast
that the United Kingdom as a whole will invest about 150 million.
This year it was about £25 million to £30 million going
in from Valpak through the main reprocessing industry. The way
the packaging recovery note system works is as an economic instrument
basically that pushes money into the reprocessing end of the chain,
which is the bottom of the supply chain, and then encourages them
to get more material collected. That has not been a perfect system
to this point for one specific reason. There has been an excess
of supply over demand, so therefore the targets, you could argue,
have not been tight enough. They should have been set much tighter
in retrospect. The challenge going forward for this government
and any subsequent governments if we stick with the present system
is to keep those targets tight so that the money keeps flowing
in at the right level to get the job done. Where we are struggling
now is to catch up at the last minute because we have had this
slackness. We have put in 30 million this year and that goes into
all sorts of things in terms of encouraging reprocessing, improving
processes and supporting the price of material in the market.
Chairman
712. Is there a problem that in a sense you
are competing for the same material as people are on doorstep
collection? If Sainsbury put in a bottle bank, are they fighting
to get the bottles into their bottle bank and to get your target
met; whereas if someone puts it in a kerbside one there is less
competition?
(Mr Turner) You pick on a particularly interesting
subject area: bring systems in supermarket carparks. Those bottles
generally are collected and dealt with by the local authorities.
The majority of supermarket systems make available space on their
carparks for the local authorities to put down their collection
systems or their bring systems and then the local authorities
take the material away. There is a change being driven by the
regulations in the thinking of the big retail operators, in trying
to get the benefit of having that material coming on to their
carparks and being brought back by their customers. They would
like to see the benefit through the packaging recovery note system
flowing to them. There is a bit of a debate going on.
713. You mean there is a bit of a conflict rather
than a debate?
(Mr Turner) Yes. The job there, even if the local
authorities collect it, is to encourage them not to landfill it.
There is still an awful lot of glass landfilled. Performance in
glass in this country is very low compared with other countries.
It is a material you can get at and it can be recycled relatively
easily and cost effectively.
Mr Brake
714. At a rough guess, I imagine I recycle about
60 per cent of household waste at the moment and the residue is
mainly plastics. Can you tell us what either of your organisations
is doing to try and help me as a consumer make that one further
step to cut down that residue even more significantly?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) Plastics have the disadvantage that
there is less of them in each unit. You have to balance how much
energy you put into transporting it anywhere. The challenge of
plastics is collecting enough to make it be worth transporting
and then having an outlet for it. There are some outlets for mixed
plastics. You can make park benches and things like that, but
there is a limit as to how many of those are needed. The alternative
is to burn it or to landfill it. It is not a problem in landfill
but ideally it is a sensible thing to go into incineration, a
combustible route.
(Mr Turner) The majority of plastic you are probably
talking about in bins, about three or four kilograms per person
per week in the United Kingdom wheelie bins, will be polyethylene,
which is not largely collected at the moment but it comes back
to the same thing. This is an economic situation. At the moment,
the packaging regulations are purely economically driven by competitive
activity in the market place. People will fish in the pool where
the cheapest material can be found. We are slowly moving up the
curve. Commercial, industrial waste has largely been mined and
we are moving into many more bring systems where the consumer
takes the material back into the bottle bank system we were talking
about. As that begins to dry up, we will have to move into domestic
waste in a very active manner. You will see many more kerbside
collection schemes appearing and at that point plastic, PET and
materials of that nature will be collected in much greater quantities
and will then drive the economic argument for putting capacity
for reprocessing that material on the ground. There are technologies
available for reprocessing it. The majority of PET is reprocessed
on the continent at the moment. There is no reprocessing capacity
in the United Kingdom to speak of but as soon as the targets drive
companies or producers to go into that waste stream the game will
change.
(Ms Bickerstaffe) There will always be a significant
amount that is so contaminated with food residues that it is simply
not going to be worth cleaning it up sufficiently. Along with
all the other comparative nasties that are in the waste stream,
there is a sizeable part of the waste stream which we need to
find an alternative use for, either incineration, ideally with
energy recovery, or landfilling.
715. On the question of incineration, do you
think incineration should be taxed?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) I cannot see why, no.
716. Landfill is taxed; why not incineration?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) Because with incineration you have
the opportunity of getting something back in the energy. It is
a sensible further use of resources that you cannot find any alternative
use for.
Chairman
717. You could argue that landfill was simply
storing stuff up for future reuse.
(Ms Bickerstaffe) Correct, and some people do mine
landfill sites.
718. Why have a tax on one and not on the other?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) Because you are definitely getting
more back from the incineration route rather than the landfill
route.
(Mr Turner) A modern energy from waste plant is actually
a superb piece of engineering equipment. It produces very low
levels of pollution. For the materials that you cannot get at
which are contaminated from the domestic waste stream, it is a
very efficient way of dealing with it. Compared with pollution
from cars, pollution from modern EFW plant is not a health problem.
719. It is a question of what you do with the
fly ash, is it not?
(Mr Turner) Yes. Of course, bottom ash always has
to go to landfill. A lot of bottom ash you recover material from.
Steel, for example, runs through the furnace and is collected
at the bottom. You can get glass out of it as well and aluminium
coming out of the bottom ash.
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