Examination of Witnesses (Questions 425-439)
Dr Peter Hedges, Dr John Whittall, Mr Arnold Black
and Mr Jeremy Tait
26 FEBRUARY 2008
Q425 Chairman: Good morning. Welcome
to this session. We are very pleased to have you here. We are
grateful for the evidence you have given. Perhaps you could introduce
yourselves and then we will take it from there.
Dr Whittall: Good morning. I am the Lead Technologist
for Sustainable Technologies at the Technology Strategy Board.
Within that area, we have the sub-area of resource efficiency,
waste and pollution management.
Mr Tait: My name is Jeremy Tait. I work for
a large environment consultancy called AEA Technology and I am
the Programme Manager for Defra's Market Transformation Programme.
Colleagues of mine at AEA also manage the Government's Envirowise
Programme and other government environmental support programmes.
Dr Hedges: I am Dr Peter Hedges. I am Head of
the programme of Economy, Environment and Crime at the Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). I am here also
representing Research Councils UK.
Q426 Lord Lewis of Newnham: Mr Lord
Chairman, this fascinates me. What is your connection with the
environment and crime?
Dr Hedges: I manage a portfolio which covers
manufacturing, sustainability, ageing and also crime and terrorism
as well.
Q427 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Forensic sciences.
Dr Hedges: Yes.
Q428 Lord Haskel: Which other organisation
did you say you represent?
Dr Hedges: Research Councils UK. The memorandum
that we provided represented the Economic and Social Research
Council as well, so I will do my best to answer questions in their
portfolio.
Mr Black: Good morning. My name is Arnold Black.
I work for a small innovation company called C-Tech Innovation
Ltd but, more importantly, I am Director of the Resource Efficiency
Knowledge Transfer Network that we run on behalf of Technology
Strategy Board. Our remit is to disseminate information on best
practice, support R&D in the area of resource efficient processing
and technologies—mainly to the SME sector.
Q429 Chairman: In the evidence we
have received, EPSRC have commented that knowledge of the properties
of materials was essential for the design of various stages of
a product's life including production, use, recycling and re-use.
It also added that the "need for a holistic view across the
areas identified is a barrier to this process; engineering, and
other designers need to have constant access to up-to-date information
on materials properties and manufacturing processes". How
do your research agendas and work programmes address this barrier?
How could research priorities be improved to co-ordinate these
different aspects and this business of not really knowing what
somebody else is doing, or being able to take advantage of the
most up-to-date ideas and technologies?
Dr Hedges: For us—and this is based on
the experience of managing research programmes in this area over
a number of years—it is quite easy to fund a particular
piece of innovation that focuses on, say, one area of technology
or is relevant to one manufacturing process or to one company.
If you take the example of our sustainable technologies initiative,
which we co-funded with DTI (as was) and the Economic and Social
Research Council, that was quite successful at funding an individual
project which led to some kind of business advantage in a particular
technology area. However, when we looked at the broader issue
of how do you achieve resource efficiency in the long term, and
certainly thinking towards, for example 2015 and the 60 per cent
CO2 emissions targets, we looked at the need to have a more holistic
understanding of the whole resource and energy life-cycle. In
order to do that effectively—as is always the case when
you adopt a life cycle approach—it is: How do you identify
boundary conditions and how can anybody who is involved in the
design and decision-making process be aware of the optimised solution?
The challenge is that the ultimate optimised solution may involve
increased costs at one stage or another, therefore, how can you
make that overall management decision? That requires designers,
engineers, right the way through to marketing, sales and everybody
involved in the decision to make or market a product, and that
is the challenge. In commissioning some of our other research
programmes and other approaches we have tried to have more of
that multidisciplinary approach. In terms of seeing some of the
questions and some of the other evidence sessions, clearly there
is a large number of government stakeholders who have an interest
and that is a further issue for us. It means ensuring that we
manage those interactions well. As a group, for example, on this
table, as organisations we do interact and we are aware, for example,
of our priorities and policies.
Q430 Chairman: Could I take that
one stage further. What comes first here, the chicken or the egg?
How should multidisciplinary research be commissioned? Should
it be best organised through managed calls for proposals or by
responding to individual requests for funding? Is there a preferred
option in your mind or do you have to go with whatever comes along—either
your perception of the requirement or other people's perception
of the need for money?
Mr Tait: There is an important aspect to this:
once a priority environmental impact or a priority product or
a priority material is identified, there are some good examples
of how the whole supply chain involved in bringing about that
impact or issue can be brought together. Furnished with the evidence
for the size of the impact and the scope for improvement, that
supply chain can work very well together, building consensus on
what the priorities are to move forward. The sort of work that
our team on the Market Transformation Programme has done, for
example, focusing on televisions—which was a particular
aspect on which your Lordships heard evidence in previous sessions—by
bringing together the suppliers, the retailers, researchers involved
in that process, you are able to build a picture of all the policies
that are impacting on that and build consensus on how these different
policies and different bodies can best be brought together to
address the issues arising from, for example, digital television
coming in and resulting in waste impacts into the waste stream
(due to replacement of older technology). Once focused around
a particular issue or theme, consensus building with the supply
chain is very practical.
Q431 Chairman: On this particular
issue of television, could you explain to us how you hope to influence
the manufacturers who, by and large, are not located in the UK
and in the first instance are not really dependent upon the UK
market. What is in it for them to respond to your request?
Mr Tait: Absolutely, the UK is not the biggest
consumer of these sorts of products. The sale of these consumer
goods and appliances is very much a global market now. Indeed,
the UK has been very successful in reaching out and influencing
globally the setting of standards for televisions and, indeed,
it brings together some of the biggest manufacturers of these
products, to sit down with the engineers, with the people responsible
for setting specifications, and get them to agree on performance
standards and other aspects of impacts based on the evidence.
Once Defra through its programmes has gathered the evidence of
the future impacts of these products—and we are not just
talking about now, we are talking about 15 or 20 years into the
future we can forecast the total impacts—faced with this
evidence, we do find that the big manufacturers do listen and
they are keen to respond. With computer equipment, for example,
evidence from the UK has been extremely influential in setting
global standards for these products. By bringing together internationally
governments and institutes and agencies of government, it is certainly
possible to influence these global supply chains.
Q432 Lord Haskel: This section we
are discussing is product design and innovation. You have explained
to us we bring the supply chain together and introduce improvements
that way, but would you call that innovation? How do you encourage
innovation? How do you get new supply chains set up, new people
coming in, new ideas?
Mr Tait: Colleagues at the table here would
speak more fully than I can on bringing totally new technologies
forward. The type of innovation which our programme has some track
record in influencing is the incremental improvement in efficiency
and waste aspects of products. Government has this year been consulting
on a set of standards for products that run to 2020, so we are
telling business, "These are the performance standards that
government expects the market to deliver for the next 15 years
or so." Once armed with this clarity, this understanding,
business can make investment decisions to work up to those standards
because they know that government at the UK and European level
is determined to see these standards improved and regulation will
follow to ensure that happens. They want to be ahead of the game.
Q433 Lord Methuen: It has been suggested
that a database which allowed the comparison of the properties
of materials would be a useful tool for designers. Is this idea
practicable? What are the potential difficulties involved in developing
such a database and who should create and maintain it?
Dr Whittall: My Lord Chairman, could I add something
in response to the previous question?
Q434 Chairman: Certainly.
Dr Whittall: The Technology Strategy Board operates
in that innovation space and the approach that we have had has
been to run competitions which increasingly have been challenge
based. For example, we have run two competitions aimed to deliver
the zero-emissions enterprise. That does two things. It has a
deliberately wide remit, so we are looking to be excited by the
community and have innovative ideas coming forward, and it also
encourages them—the mechanism is a collaborative research
and development programme—to form consortia that will bring
all the relevant competencies to bear to address that challenge.
Q435 Chairman: Do you want to come
back on that too?
Dr Hedges: I have made a note to come back to
commissioning at some point if it is relevant rather than take
any more time. I do not know if your Lordships are aware, but
there is an activity called MADE connecting materials and design,
which I found out from my colleague who is our Head of Materials
Programme. This is the one initiative that is specifically addressing
the question of how you provide information to designers on, for
example, materials properties. This is funded through the Materials
Knowledge Transfer Network, so I have to cede to my colleagues
in the Technology Strategy Board because they are the main funders
of this. Clearly initiatives are being made to try to fill this
space. How well it will work and how extensively it will embed
itself in the broader design and manufacturing community remains
to be seen. I do not have any experience of it myself to know
how well it is going but certainly more information could be provided
for you on that specific initiative.
Q436 Lord Methuen: Are you likely
to run into problems with intellectual property rights in developing
such a thing?
Mr Black: The view we have on this is that it
is very difficult to provide relevant information in a single
database because it applies to different parts of the design supply
chain. For example, it would be relatively simple to recover virgin
material into virgin material. Once it has been used, if you have
a closed-loop system whereby it is coming from a supplier who
knows what went in it originally and it is being recycled, if
you like, or re-used within the process, then they already have
all the composition data. But the minute it starts becoming composited
into an appliance or if it is being used in the packaging cycle,
for example, then it has a very different requirement for what
it would do possibly in the manufacturing cycle and it all tends
to get a bit mixed up. There have been some commercial developments
in that arena. There has been one that we know of successfully
marketed internationally by Granta Materials, based in Cambridge,
looking at a very limited number of things in a database for doing
that. There are some new ISO standards for determining the collection
and formatting and reservation of the type of information which
are due to be published this year. In fact, the Institute of Materials,
Minerals and Mining (IoM3), Dr Norman Swindells, we understand,
will be presenting evidence to the Committee on that as well if
you need more information. Our view would be that it would be
of limited use and would be extremely difficult. IPR is probably
not going to be a major issue, in that most of it would be material
that would be downgraded rather than upgraded. It is going from
a very specialist function to a lower grade function, so it would
be probably less of an issue.
Q437 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
How far is this work international?
Mr Black: I was privileged to go on a technology
mission to Japan looking at electronic scrap recycling. It has
to be said, as it often is with the Japanese, they are fairly
ahead of the game. They have instigated it very much in a closed
loop system, whereby Hitachi or Sony—I cannot remember which
one—collect all their electronic scrap back at end-of-life,
then recover the plastic from it and reformulate it by adding
more elastomers to it or anti-ageing compounds. They can determine
how long the plastic has been out and how long it has aged and
they can then determine how much of the anti-ageing compounds
that are in it are used up. They can re-compound it and bring
it back again. But that is a pretty unique supply chain.
Q438 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Dell are doing that with their computers here?
Mr Black: No. It would be very difficult here
because we have a much more diverse supply chain, a very different
mechanism for collection. We generally have a very unsegregated
waste recovery chain which makes it very difficult to do that.
Q439 Earl of Selborne: Is that not
one of the problems with IPR, that it is the system we are imposing
it on which is the problem, rather than the idea of IPR. The WEEE
Directive is a very broad-based Directive. Why not take various
aspects of that Directive; for instance, televisions sets or computer
and things of that sort? I believe there is a firm in Gloucestershire
at the moment which is doing a lot of the work here and recovering
a lot of the plastic and separating the plastic using a separation
technique that has been developed in Germany.
Mr Black: Yes, there is. If you can segregate
the component supplied at end-of-life, then it becomes much easier.
With PCs and televisions, for example, and to some extent, increasingly,
LCDs, it is quite common, simply because they are easily recognisable,
they are fairly large, bulky items and people are prepared to
take them back. When the WEEE Directive covers everything from
singing Christmas cards all the way through to electronic toothbrushes,
I am afraid these things are going to end up in the wheelie bins
as municipal waste if we are not careful.
Lord Haskel: As it has been mentioned and for
the sake of openness could I just say: I am the Honorary President
of the Materials Knowledge Transfer Network.
Chairman: Thank you.
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