Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
109-119)
MR PHILLIP
WARD
15 OCTOBER 2008
Q109 Chairman: We move on to our final
witness for this afternoon, Mr Phillip Ward, who joins us from
WRAP. You are very welcome. You are the Director for Local Government
Services.
Mr Ward: That is right.
Q110 Chairman: Thank you very much
for your two pieces of evidence. It was kind of you to update
your first submission with some more relevant comments, which
are very much appreciated. You have been patient in sitting through
our discussions, so you have got a fairly good idea of the kind
of things that we are interested in. Most people so far have welcomed
the Strategy as such, but, given the work that you do, perhaps
you would like to comment on whether you think the balance is
right within the Strategy between the recycling issues and the
waste minimisation issues?
Mr Ward: We do support the Strategy,
and we thought it was a good document. It approached the issues
in the right way and it probably will not surprise you to know
that we put quite a lot of time and effort into helping Defra
understand the numbers as we saw them from our point of view.
So we are not in fundamental disagreement with the Strategy at
all and we are very concerned to be playing a positive part in
delivering the bit of it which is concerned with the recycling
part of the story. I think one of the things that we are beginning
to understand since the Strategy was published even is the degree
to which the boundary between what can be recovered and recycled
and what necessarily has to be disposed of is constantly shifting.
Our understanding of what can be done in relation to recycling
is extending and improving all the time. The Strategy is not a
strategy for all time, but I think our only issues are, take,
for example, mixed plastic where we have done some really very
interesting work demonstrating that recycling mixed plastic does
seem to offer a better environmental outcome, certainly than incinerating
it to recover energy. We think there are some areas where we can
extend the argument about where the boundary should be. The other
one, of course, would be food waste, where, again, we have been
demonstrating that it is possible both to capture food waste from
the domestic waste stream and to put it to good use from an environmental
point of view.
Q111 Chairman: Let me bring you back
to the Strategy itself, because in your second contribution to
the committee you said in paragraph 12, "Nonetheless, we
feel that the Strategy could benefit from a more holistic approach
to the various waste streams",[7]
and you conclude that section by pointing out that really it looks
like the focus is a bit too much on the household and not enough
on the commercial and industrial sources, because, as you point
out, 9% of England's waste arises from households compared to
24% from commercial and industrial sources and, indeed, 32% from
the construction and demolition sector. Perhaps you would like
to comment on that criticism of the Strategy.
Mr Ward: In one sense we are saying
much what the other witnesses this afternoon have said, that there
were very good reasons why the municipal sector was addressed
first. There is a much more significant waste stream out there
in the commercial industrial sector. The Strategy does recognise
that, certainly more so than its predecessor. The 2000 document
really did not address this question to the extent that the new
document does; so we think the document is moving forward, but,
again, as we have already discussed, knowing precisely what to
do around the commercial industrial stream is problematic when
so little is known about its make-up, what is actually in it and
where it is going to, and so that is an area for further development.
I do not think, in a sense, we are saying the Strategy is wrong,
but what we are saying is that this is an area which is still
developing.
Q112 Chairman: Our previous witnesses
were kind enough to point out that there was effort being made,
certainly as far as the business end of the spectrum is concerned,
and trying to discover a bit more about what is in it in a more
timely fashion. Do you think, having looked at that work, that
it is sufficient? Is it proceeding fast enough?
Mr Ward: No.
Q113 Chairman: No?
Mr Ward: I think the work which
was referred to today does not in any sense look to me to be comprehensive
in terms of understanding what is going on in the commercial and
industrial waste stream, but that is an enormous task, and a very
expensive one, if you are really going to repeat the 2002 exercise,
which the Environment Agency did, which is the only, as it were,
solid data which exists. There are approaches, however, which
we believe could be adopted and which we are exploring at the
moment perhaps to take individual sectors and start breaking the
commercial and industrial waste stream down into sectors so that
you can look at what we would call the whole resource efficiency
loop, so you can look at both the waste prevention in that sector,
you can look at the collection and sorting of materials in that
sector, the reprocessing capacity that is needed for it and what
the markets might need. So we might be able to address this more
satisfactorily perhaps on a sectoral basis.
Q114 Chairman: Who should be responsible
for doing that particular exercise?
Mr Ward: The way that things work
is that we are a delivery body for Defra, and so, if Defra were
to commission us to do this work, then I think we could make a
very positive contribution to it. At the moment we do not have
that commission from them, so we are involved at the fringes of
this.
Q115 Chairman: Have you suggested
to Defra that you should have it?
Mr Ward: We have a conversation
with Defra every year about the best way to spend the budget which
is available.
Q116 Chairman: And your sub-total
budget was reduced this year.
Mr Ward: We have an agreed programme
with them, and so this is what we are doing at the moment.
Q117 Paddy Tipping: Pursuing the
Chairman's line of questioning, it would be possible to resolve
the issues of mixed plastic by 2015 and everything could be recycled
by 2015. It is technically possible. That is at least what your
Chief Executive told me. Do not look doubtful about it. She told
me this. Who would take that forward? How would you do that?
Mr Ward: What we have done so
far is to examine, as it were, the practicalities of sorting the
plastic out, but that has always been one of the big barriers.
The way in which we do all of our work is we go in, we try to
discover where the barriers are and what we can do to fix them.
One of the first barriers was: can you sort the stuff out? We
think we have demonstrated on a fairly large scale that these
things can be separated satisfactorily. We have also demonstrated
that there is a market demand for these materials if they can
be produced to a sufficient quality. We announced yesterday that
we have put together a significant consortium now to produce a
full scale trial of that in the UK, which involves Sainsbury,
Nextec and Valpak. So it is a very significant consortium we have
put together to say: let us go and do this now on a commercial
scale and prove it can be done. The next part of the story is:
can we actually arrange for it to be collected in an economic
way? Can we secure the feed stuff to go into this? Once we have
demonstrated that the whole loop can work, then, as we have seen
with, for example, bottled plastics, where we did a similar exercise
three or four years ago, the commercial sector will come in behind
it, and we are seeing very significant investments in plastics
recycling in the commercial sector on the back of us having demonstrated
the possibilities and having supported some early trials. So that
is the model that we would adopt in relation to this. It is entirely
possible, given energy prices and oil prices—I know they
have come down a bit but they are still relatively high. With
that sort of driver behind it and landfill tax and all the other
things coming on, we think it is entirely possible that the market
could pick up and could actually start providing a consistent
mixed plastic collection across the UK.
Q118 Paddy Tipping: But that is a
market approach. I am an old-fashioned Stalinist. I just believe
in saying: "This is what we are going to do", and I
cannot understand why Defra, or somebody in government, is not
saying: we are going to sort this out by 2015. Would it not be
better? The whole history of the past month has been more intervention
by government and less by the market. Did we not ought to be cracking
the whip a bit as a government and saying: "Let us get this
sorted"?
Mr Ward: Those are options. I
cannot speak for Defra. What I would say is that saying, "Let
us get it sorted", yes, of course, there are ways of doing
this, but there is a price, and someone needs to come up with
the money to make it happen in one form or another. We do not
apologise for the market-based approach because we feel that we
have actually made the market work quite well in this area and
we think there is plenty of room for further development in that
approach.
Q119 David Lepper: The Chairman has
already referred to a budget cut that WRAP has suffered as part
of the Comprehensive Spending Review in the 2007 Budget. I have
always thought that WRAP was doing a good job, and it looks as
if Joan Ruddock, who was a member of this committee and was then
Minister of Environment, thought so as well when she appeared
before the Lords' Science and Technology Committee.[8]
She said "They are doing a good job", but a number of
the programmes that you have been responsible for, I think she
cited that, "the grants to supermarkets to reduce packaging
had run their course", and I think I got a similar answer
when I asked about funding for the Real Nappies Scheme, which
I did not think had really run its course. There are far too many
still going to landfill. What is going to be the effect of that
cut in budgeting, particularly in England, because I gather that
you have received additional funding in Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland. What is going to be the effect of that cut in funding,
particularly for England? Is England going to lose out in some
of these programmes which have been discontinued?
Mr Ward: I am not sure losing
out is the way to look at it. Obviously we were disappointed with
the budget reduction. I should stress, at the point at which this
reduction was made we were on a planned growth, so the actual
budget we have for this year is not 30% below where we were but
30% below where we expected to be. It is important to make that
point. Yes, of course we were disappointed by that, and it did
mean we had to trim back on some of our programmes. The areas
where we did make significant reductions were in support of local
authority communication programmes, which we were sorry about,
but that was a choice we had to make, and also the public awareness,
the Recycle Now campaign was another area where we had to make
reductions. Again, we are concerned that that does expose us to
the risk that, despite the good progress we have made in raising
public awareness, that will begin to slide back if we cannot keep
up the pressure. Those were the sorts of areas where we made choices.
I think it is inevitable and right that we should be prepared
to not carry on doing something for ever just because we have
always done it. We do need to look back and say: "Have we
done enough in this area for it to be self-starting?" I think
the supermarket example is a fair one. The work we have done by
engaging the retailers and all the brands in that packaging work
means that innovation work now has a considerable momentum of
its own. The case for us, therefore, intervening with public money
is much less strong. We are still making some strategic interventions
there but mainly working with groups of people to look at the
generic problems rather than addressing particular innovations.
7 7 Ev 48. Back
8
8 House of Lords, Waste Reduction, Sixth Report of the
Science and Technology Select Committee, Session 2007-08, HL Paper
163-II, Evs 401-418 Back
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