Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Written Evidence


Memorandum submitted by WyeCycle

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  WyeCycle is a community business, carrying out a wide range of environmental work in the village of Wye, Kent. Established in 1989, we operate the longest running kerbside collection of organic material in the UK, alongside dry recyclables, furniture, WEEE, HHW, biodiesel production, Farmers Markets. Average waste production in Wye is 250kg/hh/yr, compared to the UK average of around 1,000kg.

  WyeCycle have for many years had an uneasy relationship with the Environment Agency, with the fundamental issue being the failure of waste licencing legislation to recognise the existence of small scale community enterprise. This long running dispute culminated in WyeCycle recently appearing in court for not having a waste management licence, and we use this experience as the basis for our submission to this enquiry.

  The attached documents set out the flaws within the current waste licencing regime as it relates to the community sector. Our proposed solution, as submitted to Sir John Harman, is also attached.

  We thank the committee, in anticipation of some swift action to resolve the current problems we describe.

Richard Boden

WyeCycle

Firstly, three facts

  1.  Of the 20 million households in the UK, none have their domestic refuse managed in a more environmentally benign manner than the 1,000 households served by WyeCycle. Domestic waste levels in Wye have been reduced to an average of 250kg/hh/yr, against the national average of 1,000kg, and WyeCycle are recognised as being pioneers in the field of sustainable waste management. We have created four full time jobs, and provide work experience and volunteering opportunities for people with mental health and other problems.

  2.  In 16 years of operation, WyeCycle have never caused, or been accused of causing, a single pollution incident. Let's be quite clear, the charges against WyeCycle are not that we have polluted the environment but that we have operated without a waste management licence.

  3.  Waste licensing legislation, as it relates to the community sector, is a shambles. This is a fact widely acknowledged by the Environment Agency (EA) and Government, as well as the hundreds of community sector projects operating illegally on a daily basis.

  It is this third point upon which WyeCycle wish to focus by way of mitigation.

  Waste licensing legislation is a shambles. The irrationality of the legislation, combined with the inconsistency and incompetence of the EA in enforcing it, make it impossible for community groups to comply.

(A) Examples of the bizarre nature of waste licensing:

  4.   Under the Waste Management Licensing (WML) regulations 1994, the following materials can all be handled without a waste management licence: Old tyres, Oil, Solvents, Refrigerants and halons, Paper sludge, Poultry Litter.

  It is, however, illegal to collect the leftovers from a jumble sale and sort the clothes for developing countries, books for recycling, pots and pans for scrap etc, without a licence. This is not just a hypothetical interpretation of the law; the EA have told WyeCycle that we cannot do this at our yard without having a licence.

  5.  Under the WML regulations, it is illegal to collect garden waste from your neighbours, compost it, and give them the compost back without a licence. Enforcement of this law has varied widely, with some EA regions turning a blind eye, some enforcing it to the letter, and some saying form a "compost club" so your neighbours are also members of your project.

  Due to widespread acknowledgement of the stupidity of this law, the national Community Composting Network were told in a meeting with Steve Lee, then head of waste at the EA, that the EA would ignore this law. Nevertheless, in some parts of the country the EA continue to threaten community groups with enforcement action if they sell or even give away their compost. In the case of WyeCycle the EA have ignored this law, allowing us to sell our compost without a licence. How can you comply with the WML regulations when your local EA operates a "pick'n'mix" attitude towards the rules? Why do you need a licence to compost garden waste but not to burn it?—thousands of landscape gardeners and council parks departments are continually burning their waste, blithely ignored by the EA.

  6.  If a householder has, for example, three items of furniture to get rid of, they have two choices. They can send a cheque for £10 to Ashford Borough Council who will then come and collect all three items and dispose of to landfill, or they can send a cheque for £10 to WyeCycle. If we get to the household and only two items of furniture are sellable through our furniture store, the law says we must only take these two items and leave the third—which the law says is "waste"—behind. The householder would then need to send a further cheque for £10 to the council to get rid of this item. Clearly, next time they had furniture to get rid of they would just let the council have the lot for landfill. WyeCycle therefore take all three items, and the council come into our yard once a fortnight to take unusable furniture to landfill. This is by far the best system—for the householder and for the environment—yet it is illegal in the absence of a WML.

  7.  By collecting waste wood in Wye, and reusing as much as possible before letting the annual Guy Fawkes bonfire have the clean residual (the mdf, painted etc going to landfill), WyeCycle handle our communities waste wood in the most environmentally manner possible. In any other community, an annual trawl round local houses for bonfire night results in all manner of dangerous material being burned. Yet we are told we must have a WML to handle waste wood, while other more dangerous disposal routes are ignored.

(B) What you have to do to get a licence (which is rather dependant on how well the EA understand their own rulebook).

  8.  The EA have for years told WyeCycle we needed a licence, and that the lowest licensing band was "less than 5,000t of waste a year". We handle 25-50t of waste a year. Such a licence would cost WyeCycle around £5,000/yr. (application fee, staff going on courses, staff being assessed by EA, changes to operating practices etc). Our total turnover is around £100,000/yr, of which 30-40k has to be raised through grant aid, with a constant struggle to pay our staff even the minimum wage.

  9.  WyeCycle recently identified a "less than 500t/yr" licence in the EA's own list of charges; when we challenged the EA on this they admitted we could operate under such a licence but they "haven't processed many of them" ie they hadn't heard of it before. This licence costs £134/yr; although the staff inspection costs etc still make it prohibitively expensive. Up until the day we received the summonses, our local EA officers were bending over backwards to help us apply for this licence; they obviously knew the regional office were going to prosecute and were/are acutely embarrassed about the fact they have failed badly in not identifying this level of licence to prevent all this happening. (In actual fact this licence only allows storage of waste not sorting, meaning we couldn't sort jumble sale leftovers, but the EA either don't understand this or are prepared to turn a blind eye; either way further evidence of the shambolic state of the legislation.)

(C) WyeCycle have done everything in their power to move this issue forward—both for their benefit and the community waste sector as a whole—yet the EA/DEFRA have failed to act.

  10.  WyeCycle have spent years highlighting the need for reform of the WML regulations as they relate to the community sector. Over the last two years we have written repeatedly to, amongst others:

    —  Sir John Harman, Chair of EA.

    —  Wil Huntley, Head of charges at EA.

    —  Dr Andrew Skinner, Director of Environmental Protection at EA.

    —  Elliott Morley/Ben Bradshaw/Tony Blair.

  We have copies of all these letters and replies received, clearly demonstrating both our efforts to become legal and the abject failure of all the above to understand the issue never mind act on it. Four years ago WyeCycle were paid by the EA to go to London and give a room full of EA people a presentation on the community waste sector and the challenges it faced, yet still nothing has been done to resolve the issues we highlighted.

(D) The left hand of the EA doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

  11.   For years the EA have said they were concerned about the watercourse in WyeCycle's yard. We have responded by saying "Tell us what you would like us to do and we will do it", yet they have always refused to give any advice. We have recently been told by Kent County Council planning department that the waste management arm of the EA have said the watercourse should be capped, but the biodiversity arm are saying that it shouldn't. How are we supposed to operate when faced with such shambolic regulation?

(E) The EA show an alarmingly poor grasp of the subject matter.

  12.   EA officers have a very poor understanding of sustainable waste management. To give one example: In a witness statement by an EA officer, he says "Mr Boden referred to material in various stages of decomposition as mature, nine-month-old compost.  .  . This statement did not make sense to me, as compost produced at (a different site) I am familiar with is mature after 16 weeks." For the EA to have such a poor knowledge of the subject must cast serious doubt on their credentials.

(F) The EA are being totally disproportionate in their assessment of risk.

  13.  The EA have spent a large amount of time and resources putting together a case against WyeCycle, whilst acknowledging that we do not pollute the environment. Meanwhile:

    —  Within a one mile radius of WyeCycle's site there are numerous examples of illegal and polluting waste disposal; fly tipping and burning. Photos of all of these are available. The EA drive past and ignore all of these every time they come to our yard. This is directly relevant to our case for two reasons; firstly because it demonstrates disproportionate treatment of WyeCycle, secondly because it needs to be understood that the existence of groups such as WyeCycle prevents such illegal waste disposal by providing a local outlet. The flytipped cookers and bags of garden waste are not from Wye where we provide a comprehensive service, they are from areas where less facilities exist.

  14.  Out of the 750,000 households in Kent, all but the 1,000 served by WyeCycle send their kitchen waste to landfill. How often do the EA prosecute landfill sites for seagulls carrying food off and dropping it in neighbouring fields and gardens to spread disease? or for having waste stored outdoors? or for smelling? or for being near watercourses? Kent sends domestic waste to a 200 acre landfill site at Rainham, the nearest thing to hell on earth you will find in the UK, literally on the banks of the Thames. Do the EA consider this to be a threat to human health or the environment?

  15.  WyeCycle wish to use this case as an opportunity to call on the Environment Agency to spend less time trying to enforce poor legislation and more time getting the legislation amended to reflect the scale of the community sector. In that way, we could all work together to achieve our common aim of a cleaner environment.

(G) Waste Management Licensing regulations.

  16.  As you are aware, I have written on several occasions to you and your colleagues urging a review of waste licensing legislation as it applies to small community groups. Nothing has happened, with the result that on 1 November WyeCycle appeared in court for not having a waste management licence. I enclose details of the case, and would urge you to spend some time reading through this to get a further understanding of the shortfalls in the current regulations.

  17.  Can I urge you, once again, to take some action on this issue. Leaving things as they are is not an option; to do so would commit the community sector and the Environment agency to spending all their time in court arguing over this issue while the polluters are left to carry on polluting. To summarise the situation:

  18(i)  Under the current regulations, if you handle one tonne of waste a year you have to comply with the same licensing requirements and fees as someone handling 5,000 tonnes of waste a year.

  (ii)  This makes it impossible for small-scale community groups to carry out local, community based action on waste reduction, as well as making it impossible for the Environment Agency to consistently enforce the law.

  (iii)  The solution is for a deminimus/ exemption to be introduced for anyone handling minute quantities of waste, followed by a couple of new charging bands with lower fees and lower levels of paperwork than the current "0-5,000t/yr".

  (iv)  We would suggest:

  To handle/treat the following tpa of waste, the following shall apply:
0-10Exempt (no paperwork) £0
11-100Licence (minimal paperwork; who, what, where etc). £100
101-500Licence (more info required, similar to existing requirements but less complex) £500
501-5,000Licensed, as per current regulatory requirements and charges for 0-5,000 tpa.


  19.  Thank you in anticipation of some swift progress on this issue. I would suggest that the above could be introduced under the Agencies existing powers to vary licensing requirements, demonstrated through the regular issuing of guidance on low risk waste activities. I note that the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee have just announced an enquiry into the work of the Environment Agency, and shall be submitting our thoughts and comments to this.

WyeCycle

November 2005


 
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