Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440-459)
Dr Peter Hedges, Dr John Whittall, Mr Arnold Black
and Mr Jeremy Tait
26 FEBRUARY 2008
Q440 Earl of Selborne: We have been
told there are gaps in knowledge regarding the recognition of
materials when a product is disassembled and the ways in which
materials can best be recycled and reused. What role could the
use of so-called "smart" materials and radio frequency
identification tags play in aiding the disassembly and sorting
of materials at the end of a product's life?
Dr Hedges: I think it is going to vary a lot
depending on the value of the material that you are wanting to
tag and the nature of the product it is in. The example has already
been quoted of, say, a PC. A PC box is relatively large and you
can imagine that the components that are inside it are probably
sufficiently valuable that it would make sense to put an RFID
tag on, so that when it is extracted you can find it. The issue,
when you drill down, for example, to a mobile phone, which is
physically a lot smaller, is therefore the technology of what
sort of tag you might use but, also, the value of the components
and the cost of disassembly. I note that you took evidence from
Nick Morley who I know is doing a lot of work on re-engineering.
There is a big difference in the interest in re-engineering a
Caterpillar earth mover, which is physically large and very expensive.
The issue, coming back to the wider resource efficiency question
that you then look at, is: Where are the volumes of resource which
is going to waste? I suspect that, if that analysis were done,
for a lot of these small products, which are in themselves not
thrown away an awful lot relatively speaking but if you are throwing
away a lot of them, the challenge then is for saying that from
a policy point of view we need to recycle mobile phones, for example,
because of the cost of materials and the energy intensity that
goes into making a mobile phone, but you then have to think of
the technical difficulties you have to get around. Ultimately,
if the value of the material is sufficiently high, I am sure the
industry will find a way of recovering it. With the rising prices
of raw materials, it may well be that this becomes an industry
driven issue.
Q441 Earl of Selborne: What about
"smart" materials?
Dr Hedges: Ultimately the question is arguably:
How smart is the material and what is it for? My knowledge of
"smart" materials is generally linked to materials which
can change their properties through some form of action. Increasingly
you can see those being used for a variety of different applications.
I can imagine it might be possible to do that kind of thing for,
for example, the disassembly. There is talk about new soft "smart"
materials for adhesives, for example, so that you glue your mobile
phone together with the sort of adhesive that you can put into
some kind of smart material disintegrator, effectively, and therefore
all the components fall apart. That is where it might work. But
whether a reversible adhesive counts as a "smart" material
or not, I am not sure.
Mr Black: Again, when we were in Japan looking
at the electronics recovery gap, they were using advanced disassembly
technologies in their labs anyway for mobile phones, for example.
Again, coming back to the cost of the components, they were interested
in separating them relatively quickly with minimal damage—so
these are materials that deform under heat or microwave or, as
you say, a "smart" glue. The big issue with them is
that there needs to be a lot more R&D into their properties.
There is a bit of consumer angst when they consider these things:
If they carry them around, will they fall apart in their pocket
if they walk too close to a satellite TV or something like that?
There is a bit of resistance to them in the market-place which
needs to be overcome. We, as the Resource Efficiency KTN, see
a very significant way forward for active disassembly of materials
rather than having to shred them up and then try to separate the
metals from them, because that is probably about where we are
at the moment. If you could disassemble them as easily as you
assemble them, then you can reuse components. Xerox, for example,
have a system whereby they claim that none of their photocopiers
are ever brand new; they always have a very high recycled content
in them and all they are doing really is changing the case in
many instances. Particularly for something like mobile phones,
which is about aesthetics rather than use, that might be a way
forward; in other words, you just change the case, change the
look, and the chip in it stays the same.
Q442 Lord Methuen: You went to Japan.
Do things get recycled at the chip level? If a PC board has chips
on it, to what extent are those recovered?
Mr Black: They were not recovering commercially
at a chip level. They were being able to separate the high value
chip components. Because of the life cycle of chips, some of them
have a higher precious metal content than others. A ten-year old
computer has more gold in it than a computer you would buy today;
therefore the components out of that particular computer have
a higher value. They were using it as a sorting mechanism. Because
they could identify the age of the machine that was coming back
to them—in many instances they were able to go back to serial
number—they knew exactly what the component was and therefore
they could recover it on value, but they were not recovering chips.
However, there is significant interest in doing that because certainly
the processing power capability of modern mobile phones, for example,
could quite easily be used in burglar alarm systems and things
like that as a second life. Even if it has gone beyond the capability
of the phone technology, it still can be used for its radio uplink
facilities for remote sensing in disabled accommodation and things
like that.
Q443 Earl of Selborne: It sounds
from Mr Black's evidence as if the Japanese are way ahead of us.
Should we be doing more research on this?
Mr Black: I hesitate to suggest that they would
be ahead of us as we are very much in the forefront for our RFID
technology, I would say. I may be wrong—and colleagues here
may be able to help me—but I would have thought we are probably
a little bit behind the curve on active disassembly technology.
I think there is a massive opportunity to do something in that
area. There is not always a disadvantage in being second because
you do not necessarily make the mistakes that the first adopter
has made. There may be advantages in building on research that
has already been done.
Q444 Earl of Selborne: Who should
be doing the research?
Mr Black: I would defer to Peter here. It is
really "blue sky" stuff at the moment, to be quite frank.
Dr Hedges: The answer is always, "Yes,
of course there should be more research". I work for the
Research Councils so of course I would say that. In terms of priorities
for research, given that the money that would be available to
fund research is limited, the question is: What priorities should
you put on that research? From my own perspective, one of the
questions for government is what the top priority from a resource
point of view is. At the moment there is a strong emphasis on
carbon. If you think that all resource streams come back to carbon
in the end, you would probably focus your efforts on tackling
those issues where there is the greatest carbon input into producing
the product in the first place and I would imagine high value
electronic goods must come up fairly highly there. Just on the
basis that if you can avoid making a chip by recycling an old
one, then that probably is going to produce a significant carbon
saving. Equally, coming back to the broader resource stream point
of view, it may well be that there are other areas but packaging
is one of the areas we are looking at at the moment, where you
are talking about very high volumes. The material itself is not
necessarily particularly carbon intensive to generate but if the
volumes are very high then the greatest carbon saving is from
managing that supply chain. In terms of priority for research,
I guess we have to focus on where the biggest resource advantage
is. I suspect the answer is not that straightforward.
Q445 Lord Lewis of Newnham: One of
you remarked on the fact that the ultimate aim of the WEEE Directive
may well be that things end up in landfill. Of course one of the
differences here is that in the WEEE area, probably more than
any others, you have a hazardous waste component associated with
it. Of course you cannot just dispose of hazardous waste in a
normal landfill. You are in a difficult situation. How far does
this govern the incentive towards designing materials? Are you
trying to design hazardous waste out of these things? Very often
it is the recognition of what is a hazardous waste in some of
these things, if I understand it correctly. Does this play a part?
Mr Black: There is a significant element of
what is called "manual de-pollution" in the WEEE collection
schemes, so you are taking things like batteries out of them.
That might be an area where our RFID tagging could be used; in
other words, if you tag the battery and you have it on a conveyor
belt, it will pick up the fact that they have missed picking up
the battery when they have shredded it. ROHS legislation is taking
a lot of the hazardous waste out before it even gets into components;
lead free soldering, for example, and that technology -although
it has to be said that that comes with ecological knock-on, in
that lead-free solder needs a higher energy input to make the
components and things like that, so it is by no means a black
and white situation. Yes, the pollution content of the WEEE Directive
will be a significant factor but, essentially, there is a step
in all the separation technologies that requires manual intervention—basically,
people picking these components off a conveyor belt.
Dr Hedges: In terms of our evidence, we talk
very much about the social dimension. The WEEE regulations can
say whatever they like, but most waste goes to landfill directly
from someone's dustbin. If they choose to throw a mobile phone
into their black sack, no one is going to be looking to see whether
it is there and it will end up in landfill irrespective. There
is an issue about a broader understanding of those issues and
the value. If someone was paid to recycle their mobile phone,
they would almost certainly recycle it. At the moment a lot of
people do, and it is a voluntary scheme, but with a lot of the
small, relatively low value electrical goods there is no particular
incentive for anybody to do anything other than just throw it
in the bin with everything else.
Q446 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
We have been talking about "smart" materials and tagged
information. You were talking about Japan and innovation and our
being second movers. The implication is that in innovation terms
we are doing quite well in some of these things but, equally,
if we look at our record in terms of recycling amongst the Europeans,
it is not very good. Is there much innovation going on in Europe
or is it that they are much better at implementing these things
than us?
Mr Black: It is a very difficult question to
answer. For example, for the WEEE Directive—which is possibly
not the best example but it is the one I know the most about—they
implemented their schemes far earlier, so therefore they have
a lot of historical evidence that allows them to backtrack, if
you like, in applying their legislation. We came to it fairly
late. If you look at statistics that are produced by some of the
other EU nations, there is an element that I find difficult to
believe when I look at the statistics that we generate here, if
that is the best way to put it. For example, if the WEEE legislation
requires you to recycle four kilograms of electronic scrap per
household or whatever it is, if you recycled one washing machine
every ten years out of one household you would meet that criterion.
It is not particularly arduous to meet it. Unfortunately, that
four kilograms will be the concrete weight in the balance block;
it will not be anything at all to do with material. It is a bit
disingenuous to claim that we are getting 80 per cent recovery
on something when perhaps the 20 per cent you want is the bit
that you are not recovering.
Mr Tait: An example where the hazardous content
for a product has hit the headlines recently—and I can show
some influence that the UK is having at a global level in dealing
with it—is the move towards compact fluorescent lamps (CFL
lamps). For energy reasons CFLs have to contain a certain amount
of mercury in order to function. The amount of mercury has historically
varied a lot because of variable manufacturing approaches. The
RoHS Directive has limited that to five milligrams per product
now. Legislation being discussed now, regulation at the European
level, the Eco-Design of Energy Using Products Directive, is looking
to push that down further to perhaps three milligrams. Indeed,
in the UK we have been participating in global initiatives to
set standards for the mercury content of these lamps. The Energy
Saving Trust in the UK is endorsing products that contain a very
low level of mercury and, indeed, there is a technology push now
with TSB and BERR interest as well to move towards LED technology
which gets away from the CFL altogether and deals with the mercury
problem. So we are looking at advancing those markets and working
with supply chains.
Q447 Lord Lewis of Newnham: The surprising
thing to me, of course, is that, although this is a very significant
factor and I would be in agreement with these procedures, the
biggest mercury pollutant at the moment is from crematoria.
Mr Tait: Yes, dental amalgams.
Q448 Lord Lewis of Newnham: As far
as I can see nothing is happening over that issue.
Mr Tait: I would not aim to deal with the issue
of dental amalgam! One of the criticisms perhaps that has been
levelled at the use of CFLs replacing incandescent lamps is the
mercury issue, but it has been shown through research now that
the amount of mercury produced through the burning of coal, generating
the electricity to power a normal lamp, actually exceeds the amount
that might get into the environment through the alternative CFL
over its lifetime. That sort of balance has therefore been dealt
with. Dental amalgam I will leave to others to discuss.
Chairman: You must appreciate the preoccupations
of this Committee with crematoria!
Q449 Lord Haskel: Perhaps we could
move on to a business perspective. Of course the primary aim of
business is the bottom line, but changes in production processes
may incur costs or require long-term investments. We were told
that standards are being set to 2020 to help long-term investment
decisions, but how can waste reduction strategies be made compatible
with the aims of a business? Quite often businesses have to make
profits in the fairly short term as well. I wonder whether your
various organisations have given any thought to that.
Dr Hedges: Perhaps I can kick off with an example.
I apologise that this is an anecdotal example and it relates to
carbon rather than waste per se but figures were quoted
to me from BP that when they introduced their own internal carbon
trading scheme it generated really quite significant bottom-line
savings in terms of efficiency gains. That is just as an example
of the fact that resource efficiency is usually very compatible
with the aims of business. Obviously there is an issue of regulation
and how that influences the business decision as to how much cost
you put on a waste stream. In another example, I am aware of a
relatively small fine chemicals company, which again I know through
my strategic advisory team, that they choose to use their waste
solvents for combined heat/power because it makes economic sense
for them to do so and that is partly because of the costs of disposal
but also because of the reduction to their energy bills. The contrast
was made with, say, a large pharmaceutical company which can afford
to put it all on a truck and send it away. "Triple bottom-line"
is the buzz word people talk about but, ultimately, in design
and manufacturing decisions cost is the first issue but very often
waste reduction has a positive cost benefit and that is partly
about just demonstrating that that is the case.
Dr Whittall: It is very difficult sometimes
to get business to take a longer-term viewpoint. The Government
can help by having clear signposts and regulation so the changing
environment is apparent to them. The cost of the waste increase
is also helpful in that respect but sometimes they need a little
bit of a push to get over that pain. In some cases it is a case
of mitigating the risk and, again, I would point to the value
of collaborative projects to share expertise and share risk and
make it just a little bit easier to get over those hurdles. There
is also scope for demonstrating projects that show the potential
of a particular technology to a wider audience and that is something
in which the RDAs in particular are involved.
Q450 Lord Lewis of Newnham: You mentioned
the cost of waste as a factor that is involved in this equation.
Would you suggest that one potential solution would be to increase
the amount of money for, say, landfill? After all, if you compare
the landfill costs in this country with many in Europe, relatively
speaking it is very much smaller. How does this influence the
manufacturing operation in the Continent as opposed to this country?
Dr Whittall: I think it is going to be a combination
of carrot and stick. Wherever we are starting from now, the pace
of that change, the increase in the cost of waste is something
that industry has to bear in the short-term. Landfill tax is ramping
up at quite a rate at the moment. I would argue that is probably
sufficient to stimulate some of those functions.
Q451 Lord Lewis of Newnham: We have
a municipal figure and a domestic figure. There are two different
scales here, so you are at liberty if you wish to tinker with
one without necessarily affecting the other. How far does that
apply in practice?
Dr Hedges: I do not know the figures, but I
am sure that when the size of the landfill tax is discussed there
is the question: If you are placing an undue burden on business,
what will that mean for business? I do not know the proportion
of UK businesses which ship a lot of waste direct to landfill
and whether that is changing. An interesting question to ask,
should you put it up, would be to what extent existing charges
have influenced behaviour. Everyone talks about the construction
industry but a lot of that comes down to the fact that materials'
suppliers supply construction materials to a fixed size: if you
are using a piece of wood, you can only cut it off once, and then
the piece that you have left is too short which is why it ends
up in a skip. Again, if you then say, "What is the best innovation
in construction?" offsite manufacturing—making units
and putting them straight into a house—is the best way of
reducing construction waste.
Q452 Lord Lewis of Newnham: Many
landfills are now developing a separate style of approach, producing
aggregates from landfill waste which they then sell on.
Dr Hedges: That is right.
Q453 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Going to this question about business costs and so forth and the
need to look long-term rather than short-term, I was wondering
how far you look at public sector procurement here. I have been
involved in Building Schools for the Future and there is quite
some criticism of that programme, that, because of the need of
local authorities at the end of the day to get what they term
"best value for money", they look at short-term best
value for money and not long-term best value for money.
Dr Hedges: Yes and that is always going to be
an issue with any kind of government procurement. Cost is always
going to be an element. Particularly with, say, innovation in
buildings, the fixed cost of putting the building up is only a
minor element of the total life-cycle cost of the building. Certainly
building or making a school which is going to be highly energy
efficient, for example, will have a significantly higher cost
in the first instance but you can get a very easy to see payback
in terms of increased energy efficiency and so on. The issue with
a lot of public procurement is built infrastructure. As anybody
who is familiar with the issues around the construction industry
will know, the construction industry is not the most innovative
but, equally, you can highlight lots of major recent procurement
projects—Terminal 5, for example, which is on cost and on
budget—that demonstrate that you can build buildings in
the UK very successfully. It is an interesting question. If you
said to the local authorities, "Yes, your best value is now
going to be calculated on a 100-year timescale," that might
change the dynamics of the mathematics but I suspect it is unlikely
that local authorities will be told that in the near future. Equally,
if from a local authority perspective it is okay—and I can
declare an interest: I was until recently a local authority councillor—if
you are talking to your electorate and saying, "Your council
tax bill is going up because of planning for the next 100 years,"
I am not sure how well that would go down. It is always going
to be a difficult issue.
Q454 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
There are also the guidelines they get from the Treasury.
Dr Hedges: In terms of building regulations:
in the plans that communities and local government have, really
challenging building regulations are the way to go. If the building
regulations are sufficiently challenging, the industry will meet
those challenges. Ultimately, customers might pay more for their
buildings but if that is what they have to do that is what they
will do.
Q455 Baroness Platt of Writtle: Getting
back to Lord Haskel's original question of business needing to
make a profit, this perhaps is rather far away from your area—the
general impression in the media is: "We have a new thing—buy
it. It is exciting. It is different." I do not think in that
situation the consumer is perhaps thinking about the energy. Amongst
young people, it is one-upmanship very often. How does that fit
in with all this?
Mr Black: The problem is that we do not generate
a true cost of the item you are buying. There is no element of
its disposal at end-of-life, for example. If we told my 25-year
old that her new phone was going to cost her £30 when she
threw it away, I think she might be disinclined to change it every
seven months. This ties in with Lady Sharp's question: we do not
look at full life-cycle analysis enough. We do not look at cradle
to cradle, whereby you can repurpose things. There is a lot to
be done in that area. When we are putting together collaborative
research programmes now, we try to insist on the ESRC being involved.
The ESRC are responsible for giving the psychological bit of the
debate: "Can you alter consumers' perception within this
project?" You can make something that is really clever or
you can make something that is 100 per cent recyclable but unless
you can persuade the public to buy it, the research is pretty
useless. We look at encouraging that kind of thing. Coming back
to the building aspect, someone mentioned to me quite an interesting
matter that I had not thought of: we are recycling our Victorian
schools into very posh apartment blocks and flats and things but,
when you look at what we are building now, in 100 years' time
will they be recycled into office and living space? I would doubt
it. Perhaps we need to be thinking a bit more innovatively in
that regard.
Q456 Lord Haskel: I think one of
the biggest constraints on waste as far as business is concerned
is the availability of landfill sites. The fact is they are filling
up and people are not willing to open new ones. The logical way
to deal with this is to design out the need for the landfill sites.
The reaction of business, of course, is either to say, "Okay,
we will just have to go and make it elsewhere" or to work
with the designers to design it out. Witnesses from the design
field have told us that their ability to design out waste is limited
due to the constraints of product briefs that businesses provide.
Is there anything that you feel you can do to help this along?
Dr Hedges: In terms of our approach to research,
a lot of our design research is now funded through our innovative
manufacturing research centres and those centres have the opportunity
of looking at the design of products in a more holistic way. Ultimately,
yes, if a design brief is totally constrained, then, yes, the
designer's ability to design out waste will be limited. In your
ideal world, where company X's brief has as the starting point:
"We will have a zero impact on the environment in our products
and services" that will have an overarching impact on the
brief that was generated in the first place. It will be written
in and writ large. I suspect in order to get to the endpoint,
if the endpoint is low environmental impact, there has to be a
high level buy-in to that concept. But, ultimately, the Government's
sustainable development strategy requires, by definition, economic
growth, so it is environmentally sustainable economic growth.
Economic growth implies new products and new services, so we are
going to continue to be making new products and new services.
The question is: how do you make them as environmentally sustainable
as possible? I suspect that ultimately there is nothing which
is totally environmentally sustainable because thermodynamics
do not work like that.
Mr Tait: The big challenge is bringing together
many different requirements, many different influences, from the
market, from consumers, from environmental constraints, et cetera.
The approach that has been proven to be quite successful with
particular product groups has been to bring together the policy
leads from the various government departments and agencies that
influence that particular product, getting them together around
a table, agreeing the initiatives that are influencing this particular
issue, this particular product problem. Just the very fact of
getting the people around a table together, talking about common
aims and common challenges and making clear how the different
policies are interacting out there in business, has meant there
are some good examples of how this has brought about a much better
end result. Bringing the Carbon Trust together with the Energy
Saving Trust together with Defra and the Treasury, et cetera,
there have been some very good results coming out of this and
there is no doubt about what business is after out of this. From
a conference that we ran a couple of years ago, one of the main
conclusions that business was asking for was that they want this
"long, loud and legal". They want it to be absolutely
clear that this is a long-term process; they want to be told about
it clearly, in no uncertain terms; and they want to have it underpinned
by a legal framework so they know exactly where they stand. This
has underpinned the process and approach that has been developed
by Defra through its Market Transformation Programme.
Q457 Lord Haskel: And the Climate
Change Bill.
Mr Tait: Yes.
Q458 Lord Lewis of Newnham: They
want the rules of the game but you must know what the game involves
before you can necessarily set the rules. One of the difficulties,
if I understand it correctly, in this particular area is in point
of fact that conditions are changing. We are not in a constant
situation.
Mr Tait: Absolutely.
Q459 Lord Lewis of Newnham: There
is a constant series of changes which may impact back on this.
I can understand why industry says, "Tell us what you want,
let us have the rules and then we will carry them out." It
makes it much easier for them. But, unfortunately, my feeling
is that we are not in that static situation.
Mr Tait: Absolutely not. One of the aspects
that business has found attractive, the sort of information that
the Market Transformation Programme has made public, is, indeed,
the Government's forecast of where business sectors are heading
in terms of the volumes, the technologies, the regulations and
other initiatives that will influence it in the future. We have
found that a very co-operative and valuable debate is stimulated
once these issues are laid on the table in the public domain for
business to start really chewing over. Lady Platt's point about
these products coming into the market very quickly puts all the
more pressure on understanding where those markets are going in
the future—writing down some volumes, some estimates, talking
them over with business, so that we can understand together where
that is taking us in terms of waste impacts.
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