Examination of witnesses (Questions 720
- 732)
TUESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2000
MR JOHN
TURNER and MS
JANE BICKERSTAFFE
Mr Blunt
720. Fly ash.
(Ms Bickerstaffe) Yes, the bottom ash can be used—
721. The problem is the fly ash.
(Ms Bickerstaffe) The fly ash is not hazardous but
it is treated as special waste as a precaution to make sure it
does not—
722. You cannot spread it on your garden?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) You cannot because it has to be
treated as special waste.
Chairman
723. It is not because it has to be treated
as special waste; it does have problems of contamination within
it. That is the problem. That was the problem with Byker.
(Ms Bickerstaffe) Byker was a mismanagement situation.
Byker was an old incinerator and what went wrong there was that
somebody mixed the fly ash with the bottom ash. They could have
used the bottom ash if they had left it alone. That was purely
bad management. The problem with incinerators is that—
Mr Blunt
724. You just said that fly ash was not hazardous.
(Ms Bickerstaffe) It is not classified as hazardous.
It is classified as special waste under the regulations.
Mr Benn
725. You said in your submission that you thought
that the waste strategy was unlikely to reduce the amount of waste
generated overall. Does that not suggest that we need to be even
tougher when it comes to producer responsibility if we are really
going to make a difference to the amount of waste produced? You
are not very keen on producer responsibility, are you?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) I am not sure if producer responsibility
does reduce the amount of waste. If by "producer responsibility"
you mean requiring manufacturing industry to pay for the disposal
or the treatment of some of their products once they end up in
the waste stream, there is a problem with that because if you
have to pay for something that you have no control over it is
like a blank cheque to somebody else. It is much better to apportion
the control where it applies. The other problem with producer
responsibility where it has operated for longest in Germany, where
the packaging is handled totally separately from the municipal
waste stream—all it has done is impose significant additional
costs on society because the management of the rest of the waste
stream without the packaging did not go down as consumers were
told it would. When you look at it, it stands to reason that it
does not because the main costs in waste management are the vehicles
and the labour costs.
726. Let us take a really mundane, practical
example: the preparation of blister packs in retail shops. You
can buy five pencils. You can buy them loose in a tray or you
can buy them in a blister pack. Would not the manufacturer or
the retailer in those circumstances, if it was a cost to them
to dispose of the blister packs after they had been opened up,
think very carefully about whether it was absolutely necessary
to do that? Would it not drive the kind of change that we are
looking for?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) You have to get those pencils somehow
in the back of a lorry. They do not just go in loose so you need
some form of containment. Whether or not that comes all the way
through to us when we buy things in the shops is not important,
we do want to have a choice in all sorts of things. We can buy
them loose or packaged but to get them from the point of production
through to the retailer does require some form of containment.
There are strong drivers already in place now to reduce the amount
of packaging or be cleverer with the way that we package things.
727. If that is the case, we could expect to
see fewer blister packs, say, in ten years time than we see at
the moment?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) You might not because there is a
trade off between the transport packaging and the sales packaging.
Very often, you can reduce one but you have to increase the other.
Taking food packaging, the amount of resources that go into food
packaging are significant because food has to be kept hygienic
etc., but the amount of resources that go into making food is
more than ten times that amount. It is better to err on the safe
side and use another gram of packaging perhaps rather than risk
wasting the food, because the resources in fishing the fish and
growing a field of wheat are huge compared to the resources used
in packaging.
728. A rather old fashioned form of producer
responsibility that people will remember from years gone by was
deposit refunds on glass bottles. It happens in lots of other
European countries. The Community Recycling Network in their evidence
said that they thought if we had one in this country the domestic
waste stream could be reduced by up to ten per cent. Why do you
think it is not a good idea, or do you think it is a good idea
to introduce a deposit refund scheme on glass?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) We in the United Kingdom still have
doorstep milk delivery which works without a deposit. Deposits
may or may not be a helpful thing. It depends what they are applied
to. In Sweden, they are applied to cars and they seem to work
to some extent there. For packaging, again you have to look at
what happens. If you put the deposit on it and you have materials
going back to a central collection point, there is only sense
in doing that if those are materials that somebody can do something
useful with. I think ten per cent is probably a very optimistic
figure. I cannot imagine that they necessarily work. We had deposits
in this country on soft drinks containers and they were gradually
eroded mainly because people did not return the containers any
longer, even though they carried ten pence on them. That is a
reflection perhaps of our society. In America they tried to hang
on to deposits for a long time. The last place that they introduced
a bottle bill with deposits was in New York. They did it for two
reasons. One, to try and protect the refillable glass bottle which
it killed in one fell swoop because, with the retailers having
to handle a lot of containers coming back, the glass was too difficult
for them to handle; it had to be carefully crated, whereas plastic
bottles and cans they could just throw in a bag in the corner.
The other thing is they hoped it would help reduce litter. It
in fact increased litter because it encouraged people to go and
empty out the litter bin to get the containers that have monetary
deposits on them but they did not then put the newspapers and
cigarette packs back in again.
(Mr Turner) I used to work for Cadbury Schweppes some
years ago and I can remember a time when about 90 per cent of
production was returnable systems. That slowly changed and now
it is totally the other way around. There is about ten per cent
returnable and 90 per cent non-returnable. One of the reasons
for the change was the amount of waste in the returnable system.
The losses incurred in returnable systems through fraud, breakage
and the winter—one of the major problems in the winter when
bottles are stored outside is people forget that they fill up
with water and freeze so it is a total loss situation. The whole
thing became extremely expensive.
Chairman
729. That is just poor management.
(Mr Turner) It became extremely expensive. In the
production process, those bottles have to be returned and washed.
The amount of energy used in washing those bottles was considerable.
The wastage when you hit cold bottles coming out of a winter scenario
and going into a boiling hot machine in the factory is again a
high percentage. Industry slowly changed over to a one trip system.
The problem now is that to reverse that would be extremely expensive,
not only for industry but for the consumer. All the supermarkets
would have to change. They do not have big enough rear storage
to handle returnable systems.
730. It is a terrible problem, is it not, in
some European countries?
(Mr Turner) Some European countries protect very fiercely
their returnable systems, particularly the German brewing industry
which is built round local returnable systems. That is a problem
for the fair and proper application of the packaging Directive
in Europe. It is a problem for the Europeans. In some European
states, there are protective systems in position for those things.
It is contrary to the Directive which is supposed to encourage
free trade.
731. It probably does not harm people if they
have to drink local beer and lager, does it?
(Mr Turner) No, but the point of that was whether
it is one trip or returnable packaging. I come back then to the
argument about which is the most environmentally effective. You
can never answer that question. You can do any study you like
on it but it comes very close. There is not much difference.
(Ms Bickerstaffe) There is another trade off. If you
put drinks into a returnable glass system and load them on the
back of a lorry as you have to, more than half the back of the
lorry is the packaging because it has to be made robust enough
to be able to withstand the reuse. If you stick it into a plastic
bottle, then 90 per cent of the back of the lorry is the product.
That is what we are trying to do. Lorry and distribution movements
on the road are much more efficient in the United Kingdom than
in other countries where they have held on to old systems. They
have not been able to update their logistics.
Mr Benn
732. What is your view of the National Waste
Awareness Initiative? How effective do you think it is proving
to be?
(Ms Bickerstaffe) It is early days yet. It is not
going to be officially launched until next year. We are one of
the board members of it and we are extremely hopeful that it will
be useful because consumers are confused about waste. They have
had a lot of conflicting messages. What we hope National Waste
Awareness will do is give them reliable information and practical
advice on how they can reduce the waste that they generate, on
how they can help recycle it and support the local authority schemes;
but also make them aware that there is always going to be a substantial
amount of their own waste which has to be handled by another method.
Incineration and landfill are going to be with us for ever. We
have to give them confidence. Instead of encouraging them to campaign
against having a local incinerator, we need to encourage them
to campaign for high standards of operation, whatever the waste
management option. We are hopeful NWAI is going to be very useful.
(Mr Turner) It is an interesting initiative. We should
also realise that part of the packaging regulations which has
just come in this year is the consumer information obligation
where sellers of products in packaging have to show that they
have started to engage with the consumer. One of the services
we offer to our members is a new website which allows consumers
to log in and find out their nearest waste take-back centre or
their nearest bring system. There is a total map for the whole
of the United Kingdom on that website. There is quite a lot of
movement beginning to take place in engaging with the consumer.
There is a big job to be done. I will be the first to admit that.
We need to work hard at it over the next few years to get the
public more aware of what is available to them. I guess if you
ask the average person on the street they would not be able to
tell you where their nearest recycling centre is.
Chairman: I suspect most of them would know
where their nearest recycling centre is. That knowledge has now
developed considerably. What they are not certain about is the
rights and wrongs of different products. On that note, we had
better finish this session. Thank you very much.
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