Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
80-99)
MR STEVE
LEE AND
MR ROBERT
LISNEY OBE
15 OCTOBER 2008
Q80 Miss McIntosh: Can I challenge
you on what you just said in reply to my question? I believe that
we are all going to have to pay a higher council tax because of
the land fill tax going up. So why should I be penalised, because
I happen to shop at a supermarket, for all this wrapping that
I do not want and I am going to be charged now to dispose of and
pay a penalty through the council tax? Why should I, as the end
user, pay? Why should it not be the producer's responsibility,
which we were told by the Environment Agency it is?
Mr Lee: CIWM definitely believes
in the strength of producer responsibility and we think that the
targets of producer responsibility will be driven upwards, and
it will be a good thing too because that will mean that obligated
businesses and compliance groupings will be driven much further
towards local authorities to make sure that they can pull their
share of materials back out of the waste stream. I believe in
producer responsibility. I am with you. When we hear further evidence
from Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP) in a minute, I
am sure they are going to tell us about the Courtauld Agreement
and I am equally sure they are going to tell us about good work
that has been done by retailers and manufacturers to get on top
of the amount of packaging that they pass on to us, the consumer.
I think it is a long-term initiative, I think it is moving in
the right direction, but that does not excuse examples of excess
packaging that we can see around us.
Q81 Miss McIntosh: When you mentioned
action in response to a question earlier—you said there
is too much talk, not enough action—what would you like
to see using waste as a resource? What action plan would you like
to see?
Mr Lee: In that case, I will pass
on to Mr Lisney.
Mr Lisney: The issue about resources
is that instead of waste we have now got two outcomes which we
never used to have or never used to consider. One is materials
and one is energy, and they need to be seen together, because
when you start to strategically plan which route things are going
to go down, you have got to look at them together and you have
got to get the balance right. Both now actually leave a substantial
income. Those two issues have changed in the last 10 years certainly
and we have now got a situation where, instead of having a relatively
easy route to waste both in the commercial and household sector,
we have actually now got an economic equation to balance and that
economic equation is really important. I think there are supply
chain issues. So both from the producers who have got a stake
in this, and they have producer responsibility notes and a financial
system right the way through from landfill tax, which is another
encouragement, all of those different mechanisms now have to be
taken into account. So energy from waste is one of those economic
balancing acts really. There are obviously incentives for doing
that from government departments as well. So we have really got
a totally different mindset, and I am not sure the mindset is
throughout the land yet.
Q82 Dan Rogerson: I wanted to come
down the hierarchy a bit. We have talked about minimisation and
recycling and we have talked about waste disposal already this
afternoon. Reuse, particularly in the context of the sort of thing
that Anne is talking about, your household packaging: packaging
provides a useful function, as you say, compared to the developing
world where loads of food is wasted because it cannot get to consumers.
That is great, but could we be doing a lot more and does the Strategy
say enough about reuse schemes? I am always told, "We used
to do it but it will not work any more." A lot of other countries
in Europe do it and they do it quite well, so what could we be
doing and does the Waste Strategy say enough about reuse?
Mr Lee: I think the Strategy is
relatively silent on reuse. That is not to say that, again, it
is not a group of issues that is not recognised by Defra being
discussed by them with their fellow government departments, the
agencies around them and through the Strategy Stakeholder Group,
which I have the opportunity to sit on. There is no doubt about
it, the third sector has got a great role to play here. They have
got a fabulous track record in reuse of everything from furniture
through to electronic articles—washing machines down to
and including radios, I suspect. That tends to be the easy end
of the spectrum. I would like to draw into the bracket of reuse,
if you like, the work that has been done by NISP. NISP has done
a great job in bringing businesses together so that one business's
waste is another business's feedstock. Whether we would need NISP
in 20/25 years' time or whether their job is to kick-start that
understanding amongst businesses, I am less convinced, but I am
still convinced that we are in that start-up period and I would
like NISP to be out there doing that job. I had a very interesting
discussion with somebody from an economically developing nation
and he tasked me with the question: "Do you think an organisation
like NISP would be needed in a country like mine?" I had
to think about that for a while and I think the answer was, no,
NISP would not be needed in a country like his, simply because
there is such a high price, a high value, put on valuable materials.
Fortunately for them in their situation, in inverted commas, of
course salaries are very low so it is very easy to bring manpower
to bear on putting materials back into use, but in this country
I think there is a great capacity still for reuse of industrial
commercial wastes and I wish NISP well in what they are doing.
Mr Lisney: I think the big area
is in the commercial and industrial sector for reuse. There has
already been a couple of schemes recently announced by the construction
industry whereby wasted materials, not even used materials, go
straight through and there is now an opportunity to make them
available for other people to use. Equally, some materials that
are not needed to be recycled in any way or reprocessed in any
way for reuse need to find a broker, basically. There are lots
of systems of brokerage but there is probably not a grand system
whereby it is much more encompassing, a one-size-fits-all, if
you like, one route to go. I think if we could get there, we would
probably find we have got a reuse economy as well and that would
make that plank of the hierarchy much more effective.
Q83 Dan Rogerson: I am particularly
interested in what we are talking about with packaging and the
household side of things, in that other countries do a lot more
of the reuse schemes. For example, with glass, smashing it up
and then melting it down and all the energy involved in that.
Why do we do that? Who do we not reuse glass bottles, and so on?
Do you think that is something that will not work in this country?
It strikes me that we have an infrastructure for getting goods
to people which is quite centralised, with lots of lorries running
up and down. Why can we not be doing the same with what comes
out?
Mr Lisney: I think the issue at
the moment is a cost, energy and logistics issue as to whether
the energy and overall environmental carbon balance of doing something
like that is right. I guess at the moment it is not, because if
it was and it was economic then it would be done. I think the
other area is that we do not have the systems infrastructure for,
say, refillable bottles, and so on, yet. I know there is a lot
of talk and there are potential trials coming from supermarkets,
I think, and let us see how we as the UK respond to those. It
is an agenda that is out there, but it is not an agenda which
actually has a lot of people batting for it at the moment.
Mr Lee: Can I draw your attention
to the Irn-Bru example in Scotland. They do use a deposit and
refund on refillable glass bottles. It is often pointed to as
a success story. I would like to get some further information
from Irn-Bru. I would like very much to know about their system.
It is only for one of their products. They sell Irn-Bru in very
many different types of packaging. This is only for their 750
ml glass bottles, so it is only a part of their business. I have
just come from a discussion with another major soft drinks manufacturer
purveyor and I have asked them why they are also not engaging
in deposit and refund. I think their answer was pretty clear.
They have done a very extensive study with the Carbon Trust looking
at the energy consumed by their products and services right from
cradle to grave and through their closed loop recycling ambitions.
Their assessment at this stage is that, by using deposit and refund
heavy glass containers, they would consume a lot more energy,
not just in the transport of them but in the refilling and washing
of them as well. They think they have more to gain by closed loop
recycling on much lighter-weight materials like PET and aluminium.
So at least these organisations are looking at it, but I keep
an open mind, as I think we all ought to, on the future of things
like deposit and refund.
Q84 Paddy Tipping: You are a professional
body with more than 7,000 members, and you are in favour of alternate
weekly collections, you are in favour of variable charging. Why
can you not get the message across?
Mr Lee: Yes, we are in favour
of these things, but we do not say that these are the only solutions
either. About half of local authorities have not gone down the
so-called alternate weekly collection route, and there may be
many local authorities who do not seize on so-called incentive
charging either. We say that these are systems that have been
proven to work well in some instances and we believe that they
will work well in some instances right across the United Kingdom.
We stand for identifying and spreading best practice. Fortunately,
we do not live in British standard towns and villages and cities;
so the solutions in different parts of the country are fit for
local circumstances. Why cannot we get the message across? Actually,
I think there are a vast number of people who are quite comfortable
with systems like alternate weekly collection. We do not know
yet whether there are vast numbers of people who would be comfortable
with things like incentive charges. That is why CIWM says we need
to have pilot schemes. There are many different variants of how
this could be put work and, frankly, until we have a go at some
of these and monitor them very carefully, see what works under
which circumstances and what does not, we are not doing much more
than guessing, which is not a very good standpoint for a professional
institution. We have always supported the idea of pilots. Getting
the message across takes us to the big communications thing and
CIWM has only really criticised the Waste Strategy for one thing,
and that is for not having a complementary communications strategy
to go with it. We have said that before it was produced, we have
said it ever since it has been produced and we are working hard
with organisations around us to at least try and co-ordinate communications
to make sure that we are using common terms, common language,
that where we have got common ground we can say, "We all
believe this is right. You might not like the answer, but we think
this is correct." You will have seen in the evidence that
CIWM has put forward to your inquiry that we took care to link
arms with the Institute of Civil Engineers and the Institute of
Mechanical Engineers because we found great common ground. One
of the things that I very much like about the Strategy and the
way that resource efficiency is starting to move in the UK is
that the artificial boundaries around parts of our business are
starting to fizzle and disappear; so we are now starting to find
common ground with the renewable energy people, we are finding
common ground with the construction materials people and we find
that we can work very closely with ICE—we are not treading
on each other's toes—and we feel that the message is amplified.
We would like Defra, the Environment Agency, WRAP, et cetera,
to work together on a common communication strategy, because there
are 50 million people to get this message across to at work and
at home and it is what they individually do that makes the difference.
Q85 Paddy Tipping: I have got your
evidence, and you are very strongly in favour of variable charging
and incentive charging. We are taking a very timorous approach
to this. The pilots are not off the ground. They seem to have
died a death somewhere between Defra and Number 10. Is it not
right that people should pay, realistically, for what they are
putting in the dustbins?
Mr Lee: In general, yes, it is
right that people should pay for the load that they are putting
on their local authority or onto the environment. I think that
is very difficult to argue with. Having said that, it would be
very insensitive, would it not, to say that we do not need to
take account of parts of the community that have special needs
or are less able to pay, or are in a very difficult position so
that they cannot actually do very much to reduce the amount of
residual waste. So there are potential down sides to incentive-based
charging as much as there are up sides. Again, I do not want to
sound like a broken record but, unless and until we pilot some
of these options, we are just guessing about what impact they
will have on how much is recycled, how much is prevented, what
residual waste we have got left and what impact that has on society.
So we are very pro pilots and we will follow them very carefully.
Q86 Paddy Tipping: Tell me briefly
what has happened to these pilots? What do you know about them?
Mr Lee: What I know about them
is that we are waiting for the Climate Change Bill because, as
you know, it is in there. The consultation that was carried out
by Defra gave local authorities a certain fixed period between
when the Bill is finally given Royal Assent and when they should
come forward with their proposals for a pilot scheme. I think
Defra have put out very carefully thought through guidance that
actually says there is a very broad range of options that the
local authorities could come forward with here. We are not going
to tell you what to come forward with and what not to come forward
with. You know the time limit. As soon as we give you the green
flag, you know that you need to come forward and we will choose
the five best spread of options that we think have come forward
from you, and I really look forward to finding out what that spread
is.
Q87 Paddy Tipping: Do you think there
will he five volunteers?
Mr Lee: It is not for me to say.
I no longer work for a local authority and I am not an elected
member. If I was to guess, yes, I think some will come forward.
Will more than five come forward? Yes, just about. I do not think
dozens will come forward, but I think some will, and I think they
will need a great deal of support from Defra, from organisations
like CIWM and from other organisations, because they will be under
intense scrutiny during the period of those pilots. But we need
that understanding. We should not be basing our future strategies
on guesswork.
Q88 Dr Strang: I wonder if you would
be kind enough to respond to one or two of the points you heard
me put to the Environment Agency. Do you think we should try to
get more effective joined up responsibility between the municipal
side and the non-municipal side, do you think, for example, we
should require local authorities to introduce integrated waste
management schemes for all sectors and do you think there are
some disincentives in the current arrangements, such as the Landfill
Tax Allowance Scheme, encouraging local authorities just to just
stick on traditional municipal waste?
Mr Lisney: Local authorities do
have a responsibility for both commercial, industrial and municipal
waste but, from a planning point of view, they have to make plans
for the disposal or processing of all materials in their areas.
I think you heard the Environment Agency say there is also a regional
level of this sort of planning as well. It is only when it comes
down to the action, the sharp end, when local authorities have
no direct impact on the whole of the commercial industrial market
economy. They do collect some trade waste, but it is a relatively
small amount compared with the vast amount overall, and there
have been some disincentives in the way the Landfill Tax Allowance
Trading Scheme has operated, which again was explained by the
Environment Agency. I think the big issue for local authorities
in working together is that now we have moved away from getting
rid of waste, from a linear approach to a closed loop approach,
materials like this bottle here does not know whether it is household
or commercial, yet it has got to go back now into the same process.
So getting some integration and cost-effective processing facilities
whereby materials in both sectors can go through processing at
the same time is something which has not been in, let us say,
the corporate remit of local authorities, it has generally been
in the remit of the local authorities within the waste environment
area, whereas if you are looking at a much broader issue, this
is now much more of a corporate community strategy type agenda
for local authorities. I do not think it has yet been presented
to them in that way. So I think the agenda for local authorities
to become much more involved in the commercial and municipal integration
is very much to be encouraged, but I think they would need to
be shown how to do it by not leaving it entirely to the current
system for waste management, if you like, in the local sector
because it is a big enough job just dealing with municipal waste.
Q89 Dr Strang: But you think it is
achievable?
Mr Lisney: I think it is achievable,
yes.
Q90 Paddy Tipping: Again, in your
interesting evidence you said that we need to open one new waste
disposal plant a week. You heard the earlier discussion with the
Environment Agency. What are the barriers? What needs to be done
to unlock this?
Mr Lisney: There are actually
very few barriers, and it is interesting to say that because obviously
we have not got a lot of infrastructure delivered in due time,
but the biggest impediment is that we do not do the strategic
planning right at the beginning. We do not actually operate as
smart clients. If we did that, we would pick up the whole thing
and plan it out. We would engage with communities in a sensible
way, share and discuss what is needed so there is greater understanding
of this whole looped process and what is processing, what is not
waste, and so on. One would be able to talk about the environmental
impact and also one would be able to look at the issue of resource
as a market issue, an economic issue, from the point of view of
the material to be recovered and sold and energy to be covered
and sold. I think once we move to an agenda which is "a good"
rather than "a bad"—waste is seen to be a bad
and, therefore, has negative pejorative issues—to one where
in the future that is the way our society is going to work, then
I think investing in the front end, right at the beginning, means
that we would get greater acceptance of facilities. We have already
got the landfill tax escalating, which I think will mean that
we are nearly at the tipping point for merchant facilities. So
I think there are two roles. We still will not get a lot of things
delivered unless our collective community has the right understanding
of what the agenda is.
Q91 Paddy Tipping: At what level
should that waste strategy be pitched?
Mr Lisney: Steve mentioned about
the work we have been doing in conjunction with the Institution
of Civil Engineers and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
In fact we have produced a document, which I can leave or send
to the committee, on the case for a resource management strategy
and how to deliver, and what we have said really is that this
is such a corporate delivery it really needs an almost inter-government
departmental team below the various departments that ensure that
the Communities and Local Government Department, BERR and Defra
and I think also OGC actually have a leadership team, because
each of these areas are now not in silos but they are very much
cross-cutting, it is very much a cross-cutting agenda, this one
now, because we have an energy department now which has just been
established in climate change. I think that is important. I might
come back to that because we have another view on that. We have
got a number of things, but there is not anybody leading below
the level of the government departments, and we feel very strongly
that, putting people together from both the departments and the
sectors, there can be a lot of ambassadors really and, once you
get ambassadors throughout the land, that helps education of key
decision-makers in the public and private sector.
Mr Lee: Can I draw your attention
to the summary of our evidence. We tried to provide a nice neat
wrapping together of the ideas, bringing in the priority points
of both ICE and IMechE as well. We identified four things that
we have got to get right to be able to deliver the strategy from
the point of view of the professionals who are actually trying
to make that happen. First was data and skills. We heard the Environment
Agency saying, actually, that they did not feel there was very
much more data needed. However, for the people who have to make
the plans and make it happen, we are a data hungry industry and
we need to up our game in terms of understanding resource flows
and we need to understand that not just on an individual town
level or even an individual local authority level.
Q92 Chairman: Can I interrupt you
here, because one of the things that struck me looking at the
data is that some of it seems to be very out of date.
Mr Lee: Of course it is.
Q93 Chairman: It takes an awfully
long time to come through, and yet when we went to visit, if you
like, waste on the ground, we are told that all kinds of returns
are going on a weekly, monthly basis to the Environment Agency
and yet when you look at the overview data some of it is four
years out of date.
Mr Lee: I can tell you that most
of the industrial and commercial waste data stems from 2002-03.
Q94 Chairman: Why is it so out of
date?
Mr Lee: It is out of date because
that is the last time the Environment Agency embarked on an industrial
and commercial waste survey right across England and Wales. It
was a national survey.
Q95 Chairman: Am I not right, and
again, sorry to interrupt, but the impression I got was that people
in that business were making weekly returns of what they were
doing?
Mr Lee: Yes, indeed they do.
Q96 Chairman: We should ask the Environment
Agency, about it. Where does all this information end up?
Mr Lee: The strength and the weakness
here with this data system that you talk about is the duty of
care and the transfer note system that underpins it. Waste from
very many businesses gets very variously described. I have seen
an awful lot of "general waste". I have seen skips full
of garage waste and materials from offices, and it does not tell
you whether it is paper or cardboard or glass and plastic mixed
in. You will find that under the duty of care, which is supposed
to be self-policing, not policed by the Environment Agency, not
policed by the local authorities, the description of waste is
nowhere near as strong as it needs to be. The duty of care is,
if you like, up on the ramps at the minute; it is being discussed
by Defra and a very broad range of stakeholders for reintroduction
probably at about October 2009. We hope that the duty of care
will be much stronger, we hope that people will be coding their
wastes in very standard ways and we hope that the data that comes
out of the duty of care will help people like Bob and me and members
of the Chartered Institution to make decisions. At the moment
it does nothing much more than its first intention, which was
to make sure that the next person in the chain of responsibility
for that waste, in general, knows what it is, knows how it is
contained and they know how to prevent it causing harm to people
or the environment. As a data stream, I have to say, it is not
very strong at all.
Mr Lisney: May I add, Chairman,
that the data has never needed to be used before for business
reasons, for economic reasons, whereas now, because of the lack
of infrastructure, we need to use it in order to avoid risk. We
need to know where the flow of materials is coming from in order
to invest in infrastructure. There is a project, the Environment
Agency are putting a lot of money into developing electronic duty
of care at the moment, and in the south east region, in conjunction
with WRAP and the South East Regional Development Agency—we
are currently acting as pro bono director—we are
launching what is called a pathway to zero waste programme with
all the various actors in that area looking at how to deliver
to infrastructure for a closed loop system and to avoid waste
at all. One of the key issues for that is data right at the beginning,
because you need to influence 74 local authorities, the whole
of the regional technical advisory and planning system, and so
on, and what the agency will be doing, putting a lot of resources
and piloting and trying it out there, is this new system, and
that will provide data on a monthly basis which can be much more
effective in terms of taking decisions because you will be able
to graphically look at where the flows are. We have not had that
before.
Q97 David Lepper: Where will that
data be available?
Mr Lisney: That will be data available
online. It will be available for everybody to see.
Q98 David Lepper: From SEEDA?
Mr Lisney: The data will be the
Environment Agency's data.
Q99 Lynne Jones: You heard the discussion
earlier about energy from waste and the relatively inefficient
processes that we have. I notice that you are neutral on the types
of technology, saying that no one type of technology should be
promoted above another. I wonder why that is when that sort of
policy just means that we carry on developing incinerators because
people are used to them rather than encouraging advanced conversion
technologies that are much more efficient. Would you care to comment
on whether there are elements in the Waste Strategy which could
be improved so that we are much more effective in the type of
energy from waste plants that we generate?
Mr Lee: We did not think that
it was the job of a national strategy to dictate which is the
perfect technology. I said earlier on that, fortunately, in the
UK we tend not to live in standard communities; we do not have
standard towns. There are very different circumstances, depending
on whether you live in rural Cumbria or whether you live in the
heart of Leicester. They are very different. We believe that the
organisations that are in the best position to understand the
local needs are the local authorities. Having said that, again,
we see that there is great scope.
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