Examination of Witnesses (Questions 372-379)
MR ANDY
MOORE AND
MS JANE
STEPHENSON
WEDNESDAY 5 FEBRUARY 2003
Chairman
372. Welcome. Is there anything you would like
to say before we start to ask you questions?
(Mr Moore) Apologies for the lack of
written submission. There will be one to follow.[13]
I am Andy Moore, the coordinator for the Community Recycling Network.
Jane is director of the recycling consortium which is also local
to Bristol where the CRN is based and her organisation is a member
of the community recycling project.
Mr Chaytor
373. Every Tuesday morning in my neighbourhood,
two men and a Ford transit van arrive at my back door and take
away my recycled rubbish, my paper, glass and cardboard but they
do not take away my plastic. Every Thursday morning, two more
men in a much bigger vehicle come to try and empty my dustbin
but there is very little left in the dustbin because it has all
been taken on the Tuesday morning. Would it not be more efficient
to have invested the resources into the various community projects,
into improving the facility provided by the local authority?
(Mr Moore) The gentlemen who come in the transit van
are our members, are they?
374. They are a local, community based recycling
project and they are hugely efficient and extremely polite but
they are making the same journey up the hill as the local authority
collection service.
(Mr Moore) It is still the practice in most local
authorities, even where they do not have community projects as
you do, to do the recycling separately from the residual collections.
There are a number of reasons for that to do with logistics and
also practicality of the vehicles. I am struggling to think of
one in the UK but there are others elsewhere where they compact
in a double compactor the recyclables and the residual waste and
the results are quite lamentable, as you may imagine. Our belief
is that the best way to conduct recycling collections is to have
the householder do as much sorting as they possibly can. We define
our collections as householder separated kerbside collections.
Those produced the best quality materials. At the moment, it does
not appear to be logical to do it all in one vehicle on one day.
(Ms Stephenson) I was in a meeting recently with a
waste contractor—I cannot say who it was—but they
have had some experience of trying to do it in a split vehicle
with compaction of both materials and it has been a dismal failure
because they were delivering to two different points, the composition
and relative weights of the different fractions varied seasonally
and it did not work. It was not the best, most efficient way of
doing it.
375. In terms of the management responsibility
for the collection, whether for recycling or to go to landfill,
do you think there is any value in having community groups taking
the responsibility as against a local authority contracted company?
(Mr Moore) Specifically community based, yes, of course
we do. We think it confers a number of advantages, particularly
of a not for profit nature. They are based locally in the community
and are at least as accountable to it as the local authority is
itself.
376. How far are we away from making such community
groups self-sufficient? Are we getting to a point at which the
market will take over or are we light years away from that?
(Mr Moore) When you say that the market can take over,
do you mean the private sector?
377. All the community groups collecting are
only doing it with grant aid.
(Ms Stephenson) There are two big players, Community
Transport and Friends of the Earth, who have contracts with lots
of local authorities around the country delivering kerbside collections.
The trends are that many local authorities are looking to develop
their own, home grown versions of those two organisations. I am
working with a number of local authorities who would like to see
that happen in their own areas. In Wales, there is a strong movement
to that sort of development for some of the reasons that Andy
has outlined. Very often the community groups can bring in other
social and economic agendas like job creation, training and community
development, which I think are being missed often from waste management
companies and local authorities and regional and central government.
That is the benefit that we add.
(Mr Moore) One in five Londoners gets a service from
our members on a local authority contracted basis, not on a grant
aided basis.
378. Do you have an estimate for the number
of jobs in the sector as a whole and specifically in the area
which is financially self-sufficient?
(Mr Moore) In the sector as a whole, there is a statistic
quoted in the Waste Watch submission to the Committee which I
think says about 4,000, which is about right. Estimates vary but
I would say it is of that order of magnitude. We need perhaps
1,500 self-sufficient jobs in kerbside.
(Ms Stephenson) I would like to challenge you on this
whole issue of self-sufficiency because you could argue that the
waste management companies are getting public money to deliver
a service. What the community sector often does is draw in additional
money from other sources to make them self-sufficient. Given the
economic climate that they operate under, they are very robust.
The organisations that I have been associated with in the Bristol
area have been operating for over 20 years through a number of
different governments and local authority controls, in a number
of different economic scenarios and we have managed to survive.
That says quite a lot.
379. In terms of the potential for the expansion
of these 4,000 jobs, what do you judge that to be?
(Mr Moore) It can be expanded. There were some figures
put out by Robin Murray and they can be related also to figures
in reprocessing as well but there are tens of thousands of jobs
in separated waste collections.
(Ms Stephenson) It is not just the collection side.
Part of the infrastructure is what Waste Watch is all about which
is the awareness raising and education. That, to my mind, is part
of the necessary infrastructure to make this whole thing work.
13 Please refer to the memorandum submitted by Waste
Watch, Ev. 119 Back
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