Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
76-79)
MR STEVE
LEE AND
MR ROBERT
LISNEY OBE
15 OCTOBER 2008
Chairman: Gentlemen, I am sorry you were
delayed from when you might have anticipated coming before us,
but, as you can see, the enthusiasm of the committee for this
subject knows no bounds and they have a lot of points to raise
with the Environment Agency. Nonetheless, you are very welcome.
Formally, may I welcome the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management
and Steve Lee, their Chief Executive Officer, who I think was
previously known to us in his incarnation with the Environment
Agency—he is no stranger to the committee and we are delighted
to see you here again—and you are supported by Robert Lisney,
who is the Chair of the Institution's Strategy Special Interest
Group. It sounds magnificent. Perhaps we had better find out about
that. Before I get too carried away, Anne McIntosh is going to
start off our questioning.
Q76 Miss McIntosh: Do you think there
is too much emphasis on household waste at present, given the
fact it is only a low percentage of waste overall?
Mr Lee: The easy answer to that
is, yes. We started off with a very heavy concentration on municipal
waste, for very good reasons, and we heard an explanation of that
in the evidence from the Environment Agency. We have got stiff
measures, stiff targets to meet through European directives. Local
authorities, I guess because of the role that they play, make
themselves a relatively easy target for targets. We were actually
quite pleased with the Strategy as it was produced in 2007. It
was only a strategy, it is not a plan, and in chapter eight there
are something like 94 individual actions mapped out there for
pieces of work that are promised to be delivered by Defra and
other agencies. That is an enormous amount of work and there are
some brave promises in there in terms of the time that they are
going to be delivered, but it is only a strategy, and through
doing that work under the Strategy's plan, we are quite confident
that the focus of attention is going to come specifically off
municipal waste and is going to have a much broader focus on all
materials, and I think you will find that is a running theme through
anything that CIWM has to say today. We want to look at wastes
as materials; we want to look at it in the round. The fact that
the concentration is coming off just municipal and looking at
resources in the round we applaud.
Q77 Miss McIntosh: Moving on from
there, you probably would agree that there is not enough focus
on minimisation rather than recycling and reuse in the Waste Strategy?
Mr Lee: Yes. On minimisation,
"focus" is an interesting word. There is a lot of focus
on minimisation at the moment, but we need to turn that focus
into action. It needs to be brought down to ground level so that
people like our members, local authorities and the regulators
can actually do something practical about minimisation. I suspect
your inquiry will find that there is no shortage of ideas that
are put forward in both verbal and written evidence. Perhaps one
of the big challenges to you is to find something that is not
already out there being discussed by Defra, by other departments
and by other agencies that are part of actually making this strategy
happen. There are lots of ideas, but minimisation is starting
behind recycling. Recycling has been relatively easy to bite into.
Everyone understands what recycling is. Actually it is very heart-warming
that the public want to be part of recycling. It is recognised
by most people now as one of the first things that they can do
as a personal or as a household contribution to combating climate
change or to being more resource efficient. It is brilliant, but
actually bringing about minimisation, I think, takes an awful
lot more effort. There is some good work that has been done, perhaps
we should name-check agencies like Envirowise, some great work
being done by NISP, the Environment Agency talked about what they
do through their regulatory regimes to encourage waste minimisation,
but we do need to see more. We know that through general pressures
thorough the landfill tax and the Landfill Directive that actually
less is going to landfill, particularly from industry and commerce.
Post consumers: rather different. It is probably correct that
municipal waste continues to grow, but probably not at the 3%
per year figure that tends to get thrown around. We suspect that
the real rate of growth of municipal waste has seriously slowed
down, it is probably closer to 1% now, and we are aware of some
further work coming from Defra to actually have a look at that
rate of growth of municipal waste, and their intention will be
to at least fight municipal waste back to a position where it
is no longer growing. What we then need to do is to turn the picture
around and say that we are getting on top of consumer waste and
we are successfully driving minimisation. That, I think, is probably
the most important work on municipal waste remaining to be done.
We also believe that there is a very important role for industry
and commerce to play here. There is a very big question as to
whether or not waste can be designed out, not just out of products
but out of services and out of processes as well. We have heard
a lot from the Environment Agency about how they would intend
to do that through the businesses that they regulate. CIWM is
also targeting manufacturers and service industries. Interestingly,
we train more people outside of our sector now than we train inside
our sector. We take that as quite a positive fact that businesses
around us now are recognising that this is what they need to do,
and we have got an entry level award, called a Waste Awareness
Certificate, that is actually aimed at people who have got hands-on
responsibility for materials in businesses, and we think that
somewhere during the course of 2009 we will issue our ten thousandth
Waste Awareness Certificate. Obviously, we aspire to a lot more,
but we want to see businesses materials, resource, energy and
waste aware because they have to be, particularly SMEs.
Q78 Miss McIntosh: Surely the worst
offenders are the people that pack the stuff and send them to
the supermarket. One of the good guys, Cadbury's, trying to deliver
Easter eggs without the packaging, does pose problems because
they have got to make sure that they are not smashed before they
reach the supermarket. It does drive people to distraction that
when you get home, if you do shop in a supermarket, before you
have put the stuff away you have emptied a whole load of rubbish.
Are you driving that sort of rubbish down?
Mr Lee: I do not think it is the
business of CIWM to drive down packaging, but we use our body
of knowledge to influence wherever we can. There are examples
of excessive packaging. There is no doubt about it. We can see
them when we walk around the supermarkets ourselves. There are
also very many good players out there. You have name-checked one;
I could name-check a dozen others who are using their product
design to reduce the weight or to simplify the materials that
they are using for their packaging. Actually packaging does a
very valuable job in terms of protecting the product that is inside
it, making sure that there is no loss from the point of production
through to the consumer, and in very many cases, of course, it
dramatically extends the shelf life of the product, stopping horrendous
wastage. I think it is very easy to see packaging as evil, the
root of all problems with resource management. Actually packaging
is necessary, does a very good job, but we need to make sure that
rare examples of excessive packing are identified and are worked
on. I would pick up on the Easter egg issue, however, because
this is the one example that everybody throws at me. When you
buy an Easter egg, you buy it because it is fun. You are buying
it for your children, or you are buying it because it is gorgeous
and you are buying it for your mother or a lover. You are buying
it because it is packaged; you are not buying it because it is
chocolate. If you want chocolate you buy a bar. So actually an
Easter egg is packaging with a little bit of chocolate on the
inside.
Q79 Chairman: CIWM will be selling
Easter bars next year as a fund raiser!
Mr Lee: I wish we could.
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