Memorandum by Professor Sue Grimes SITA
and Royal Academy Professor of Waste Management, of the Centre
for Environmental Control & Waste Management, Imperial College,
London
1. BETTER DESIGN
AND THE
USE OF
MATERIALS
The concept of "design for the environment"
is directed essentially at the end of life of products in order
to maximise reuse and recycling of materials.
The problem faced by many industries is that
there is often a conflict between fitness for purpose of their
products and the ease of material recovery at end of life. There
are undoubtedly barriers to the use of sustainable materials in
production where there is a possibility that the technical performance
of the product is diminished. Although emphasis is sometimes placed
on changes in the materials specified at the design phase, there
are in fact three ways of achieving sustainability throughout
the life of a product:
(i)
Direct replacement of materials that have an adverse
environmental impact with materials that lead to greater sustainability.
This would be the preferred option subject to manufacturing, fitness
for purpose and end-of-life treatment issues. In this context
a major problem arises from the use of composite materials by
manufacturers—for example plastics that contain additives
such as fire retardants and conducting materials to reduce electrostatic
properties but which make the composite difficult or expensive
to reuse or recycle. For this reason research on the use of more
sustainable materials in design for the environment must take
account of the need for efficient and economic end of life disposal
in addition to the product technical specifications.
(ii)
Electronic smart tagging of product materials and
components to permit automatic sorting of materials at end of
life into fractions that maximise opportunities for reuse, recycle
and remanufacture. This method also has to involve the design
stage of the product life cycle to ensure that the information
contained in the tags permits the identification of components
and materials after deconstruction to ensure that the data on
the tag identify the specification of the material or component;
the best practicable economic and environmental recovery options
for reuse, recycle or remanufacture and information on the return
of valuable secondary materials to appropriate commercial cycles.
(iii)
In situations where it is not possible to alter design
to accommodate new materials or tagging methodologies, because
of technical requirements, new technologies to ensure that maximum
recycling, reuse and recovery have to be developed to recover
value at end of life. An example of this would be the development
of leaching technologies to separate composite materials into
fractions that can be reused and recycled, while minimising the
amount of material going to landfill.
The hierarchy of these strategies is:
— Replacement is preferable to tagging.
— Tagging is preferable to separation
technology.
— Separation technology is preferable
to end of life disposal.
There is no doubt that better design could minimise
the creation of waste that is difficult to recycle. Design input
alone, however, is unlikely to achieve sustainability without
the involvement of experts from the fields of material science
and waste treatment for optimum recovery. Sustainability throughout
the life cycle of a product will best be achieved through greater
interaction between practitioners in design for purpose, in the
development of new materials and in the methods of maximising
reuse, recycling and remanufacture and such collaboration must
be encouraged.
2. GOVERNMENT
POLICY
A major problem for the reuse and recycling
industries lies in the legal definition of waste. In some situations,
a perfectly acceptable reusable by-product of waste treatment
will still be regarded as waste requiring any user to have a waste
management licence. Although this definition has been modified
in some circumstances recently, sustainability will never be achieved
if the products from treatment of waste are not regarded as commercial
products in their own right without carrying the label "waste"
forward to their end use.
An opportunity exists for the Government to
promote the development of new methods to achieve sustainable
products through the Environmental Trust bodies' use of funds
from the landfill tax credit scheme. The recent restrictions placed
on the Environmental Trusts on the direct uses of the funds specifically
exclude this type of support. There seems to be no logical reason
why the Trusts should not be able to support research and development
of research solutions that are promising but not currently close
to market. The current concept of the need to develop partnerships
between the Trusts and the industry sector could catalyse more
work on linking manufacture to end of life recovery provided that
there is sufficient interest from the waste producing manufacturing
industries, otherwise landfill tax benefits will be wasted.
3. SKILLS
There are many training programmes in universities,
colleges and institutions such as the CIWM that include consideration
that sustainable waste in broader industrial training courses.
Although this is a good starting point there is a case for the
urgent development of training programmes at the highest level
to maximise knowledge input from all of the branches of science
and technology to produce graduates with expertise on sustainable
manufacture from design to end-of-life treatment. This training
ideally should be at post-graduate level and include (i) Masters
degrees to enable graduates in appropriate disciplines to extend
their knowledge base into other disciplines and (ii) industrially-based
Doctorate degrees (such as the Eng.D.) to encourage inter-disciplinary
research to close knowledge gaps and develop novel methodologies
and techniques for sustainability.
October 2007
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