Examination of Witnesses (Questions 620-634)
Professor Sue Grimes, Dr Norman Swindells and Mr
Malcolm Wilkinson
18 MARCH 2008
Q620 Lord Lewis of Newnham: The prime
example of this to me is sodium chloride. Sodium and chlorine
are quite nasty compounds but sodium chloride together is a perfectly
reasonable compound.
Dr Swindells: It is.
Lord Crickhowell: Having chaired another Committee,
which a colleague of this Committee was also on, on the whole
REACH Regulations I think if we start getting down that road today
we might get entangled for a very long time without actually adding
much to the whole business about waste. There is a very comprehensive
report that has been produced to the House on the REACH Regulations,
and I do not think it is the job probably of this Committee to
try and duplicate that inquiry.
Chairman: Yes, I think we should move on.
Q621 Lord Howie of Troon: I want
to ask about the education of young designers and engineers as
far as sustainability and waste reduction is concerned—and
I speak as an engineer myself, by the way. Do you think that undergraduate
courses should include an overview of sustainability or would
it be better to leave that to the Masters and Doctorate level?
Professor Grimes: I think there is a very good
case of actually introducing undergraduates to sustainability
and waste issues, but I think at that point—and I think
you would be alluding to this in your question—at such a
level it would be peripheral to the degree that the candidates
are following, but, nevertheless, it would be a good exposure.
In your question you said would it not be better to introduce
this combination of training at a Masters and Doctorate level
and my answer is absolutely yes, it would be a much better level
because of the multi-disciplinarity in these two subject areas
and they need to be brought together. Even if you look at the
Masters courses that are running currently, particularly from
my area of waste management, all of them are focused at end of
life rather than at looking at whole life sustainability. There
are some that have elements that will bring in parallel topics
but I think there is a good opportunity for looking at sustainable
resource management and seeking to bring those two aspects together.
I think the other opportunity is at the Doctorate level, again
an area in which I have a number of years of experience having
had ten students going through an Eng.D programme, I think the
attractiveness of that type of programme sits very comfortably
with this particular subject in the sense that you would be placing
high quality graduates in an industry where they would learn very
quickly what sustainability meant within that industry and that
they in parallel would learn the generic research methods that
bring together sustainability and industrial practice, and I think
that that really would be the strongest development and outcome.
I think there is an opportunity—and I am trying to push
it forward myself at Imperial—and seeking support from the
Research Councils through their programme Living with Environmental
Change, to try and bridge this gap and seek to develop these types
of programmes.
Q622 Lord Howie of Troon: I think
that engineering is such a wide subject in any case that it would
be difficult to cram in any more. What do our engineers think
about it?
Mr Wilkinson: Sustainable development is now
part of the core curriculum for chemical engineering undergraduates—at
least it is in the list of what should be in the core curriculum;
so all of the accredited departments are trying to address the
issue. I think our objective is to drive it into the curriculum
in the same way that we have driven safety into the curriculum.
For a chemical engineer now safety is a fundamental part of the
design approach and our objective is to make sustainable development
a fundamental part of the design approach too in that same way.
I do not think we are there yet—it has only been a core
component of the curriculum for perhaps three years now. As I
said at the seminar, there is an issue around material, around
what are you actually going to teach, and the Royal Academy of
Engineering of course funded a number of Chairs in sustainable
development at various engineering faculties around the UK, and
they have produced some material which is globally available,
which any department can use. So there is the start of a framework
but I think there is still some way to go.
Q623 Lord Howie of Troon: How much
do they actually do?
Mr Wilkinson: I am sorry you have asked me that
because I asked exactly the same question of our Accreditation
Committee and they do not actually have an answer yet! I think
the answer would be that it is variable across departments; there
are some departments which really focus on it and it really is
part of their curriculum, and others where it is very much an
add-on and it is quite peripheral treatment at this moment. As
I say, we are some way away from it being quite where we would
like it to be.
Dr Swindells: I support Mr Wilkinson in the
same way. The Institute of Materials accredits universities and
colleges according to the requirements of the Engineering Council,
and that includes sustainability in all its guidelines. I got
the same answer as Mr Wilkinson when I asked how many, and the
answer was, "We do not know yet." So I think it is a
very important issue. I agree with my colleagues there is a requirement
to be able to set an appropriate intellectual standard in the
engineering course so that they do not see it as a kind of hand
waving exercise by comparison with their more mathematical-based
subjects. I think it is quite an intellectual challenge for the
teachers to be able to set the appropriate standard appropriate
to a degree course.
Mr Wilkinson: I have a story that demonstrates
some success. Talking to industrialists they are starting to say,
"My new chemical engineering graduates appearing on their
first day are asking, `What are we doing about sustainability?'"
So that is quite a step forward.
Q624 Baroness Platt of Writtle: It
is clearly a very fast moving subject, not clearly appreciated
at all levels, and one has to think in terms of whole lifecycle.
How much continual professional development is happening with
people who are actually already in the industry?
Dr Swindells: There are several examples. The
Institute of Materials Minerals and Mining provides a list of
personal development courses and one I noticed from the London
Metropolitan University is particularly concerned with design
for minimising the production of waste. The extent of that course
is only four days, so I think it is a developing situation, and
probably Professor Grimes will know more than me.
Professor Grimes: Most of the courses that I
have come across are MSc courses, but of course having run MSE
programmes myself it is very easy to convert these into short
taught modules. But in terms of sustainability and design, and
sustainability and waste management, very little I would say.
Q625 Chairman: So there is not very
much sustainability in waste management in the structure of the
courses?
Professor Grimes: No.
Q626 Chairman: You are talking about
it for metals but you are not talking about it for education in
any serious way. The top-up courses, you are not really giving
very much weight to them, so would that be done on a voluntary
basis or if there are statutory requirements that might well follow
on from, for example, what we are doing, would you think this
would be a requirement for people to sustain their professional
qualifications to have to undergo courses of this nature at regular
intervals as, let us say, medics have to do in some of their areas?
Obviously that is rather more a matter of life and death.
Professor Grimes: So that we get a holistic
view of sustainable design through to end of life I think it is
a very good thing to encourage development programmes that would
actually offer industrialists short top-up training. I think we
have seen it in environmental management and environmental systems
that have developed over the years and that has taken off very
effectively. So it has given people an awareness and an understanding.
The market will perhaps be smaller looking at sustainability and
design for end of life but, nevertheless, I think there is good
scope for trying to set up such training.
Mr Wilkinson: Our subject groups do run half
day, evening and one day events, conferences, and if you looked
at the range of issues now you would start to see an increasing
number of events focusing on sustainable development and sustainability.
Although they are not in any sense accredited—you do not
get points for attending—they do help continuous professional
development. If you are talking about a point system we are back
to talking about licensing engineers, are we not, and the whole
gamut of, as you say, making it like the medical profession.
Q627 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Picking up the same issue we have been told consistently that
more dialogue is needed between designers and the processing companies.
To what extent is there evidence to suggest that this type of
dialogue has been successful in reducing the amount of waste created
by products throughout their lifecycle? Is there enough data available
about this as well?
Dr Swindells: I do not know about data, but
there several examples where that has happened. There is an example
from the steel industry where the steel producers developed a
strong relationship with their suppliers of scrap materials, particularly
to reduce the amount of copper in the stuff that they were sending
to the steel manufacturers—and that was an ongoing thing.
Another example is from the auto industry, where they now have
to take responsibility for the recovery of materials from end
of life vehicles and this proportion has gone up from 85% to 95%.
But there they have a whole infrastructure of control, so the
original equipment manufacturers control the supply chain to the
input for the car but they also control the reverse chain in the
other direction, and in that case they have designers embedded
in the companies so that they can make the decisions at the design
stage to save the company money when they get to the recycling
stage. One way that companies are doing this is to reduce the
amount of types of plastic, for example, and also to make large
components, things like insides of doors of a car, just in one
plastic so that you have one thing to be dealt with as a whole.
So I think that these kinds of situations are starting because
they are being driven by the directive in the legislation that
says they have to take responsibility for these things, but there
are only a few parts of industry where that is happening.
Q628 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Do you think that without the directive this would not necessarily
have happened?
Dr Swindells: Certainly not, no.
Professor Grimes: If I could just add to that
from a personal example my work with GSK, an example of where
their design team have actually been speaking to recyclers, their
Lucozade bottle was formally a PET bottle with a PVC sleeve and
of course once they started talking to the recyclers the recyclers
said, "Get rid of that PVC," so of course now they have
designed their bottle as a fully PET-base matrix, with a little
bit of polypropylene. But that has been based on the problems
associated with density material, so it is going to ease separation
at end of life. But just picking up the point there about the
automotive industry, again with work that we are doing with GSK
we are looking at opportunities to use high quality plastics in
a second use application and the automotive industry is one such
example that provides an opportunity for these types of high quality
streams where it can cope with a little bit of contamination in
a recyclate stream and can be carried forward. So these are just
parts of the process that are underway.
Mr Wilkinson: Can I just add a point? These
issues are supply chain issues, as you clearly say, and they have
to be considered as such. There is some interesting work by Professor
Clift of the University of Surrey, looking at these issues in
supply chains. He plots, looking at a product—and he has
done it for a range of things, mobile phones, for example, for
Nokia -at the carbon footprint across the total lifecycle of the
product against its added value, and then he divides that up along
the supply chain. So ideally you would want a straight line at
45 degrees as the ratio between carbon footprint and added value
for the total product, but what you are actually seeing, of course,
is for the extractive industries a huge environmental impact and
hardly any added value. And as you go along the supply chain the
curve flattens out and the manufacturers have a bit less environmental
impact and a bit more added value and it finishes up with the
retailer with hardly any environmental impact and a huge added
value. Then of course when you focus on it in that way, with the
objective of trying to drive the curve down to the 45 degree line,
you can start to see where changes need to be made.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: That is very interesting.
Q629 Lord May of Oxford: Still on
reusable materials, we have heard a lot about the difficulties
in separating raw materials from these waste streams and I would
like to ask you what do you see in the way of new technologies
that can help us do that and what are the likely implications
for the design stage?
Professor Grimes: If I could just comment on
that I think it links very closely back to the first question
that was asked about materials and standards, and I think there
is a huge opportunity to try and link materials and understanding
what the materials are at the start of life through to end of
life. The example that we are working on at the moment, again
with research with GSK—and we have a grant application to
the Technology Strategy Board with Veolia and Asda and GSK—is
looking at tagging for use in recycling post-consumer waste, by
putting tags on materials at the start of their product life,
the products at the start of their product life, so that that
can be tracked through to end of life, and that will facilitate
the ease of separation of moving to automatic sorting. Tagging
will provide a means of identifying recyclable, re-manufacturable
reusable or recoverable components and will also provide a means
for identifying those hazardous components that we spoke about
earlier, such as the brominated flame retardants. The way this
will be achieved will be using a tag and in the first instance
it will be just using a tag like an RFID—a radio frequency
identification tag—but moving on from there it is to develop
the conducting polymer type tag, which effectively will give us
just an ink spot of information on each component within a product
that will be of value at end-of-life. That is one aspect of new
technology and of course if you link that to something like a
reverse vending machine where we have some trials taking place
with GSK again, in the country, capturing the stream of a PET
bottle; but what the reverse vending availability could offer,
if it is appropriately configured, is the opportunity to source
separate the waste so that you can separate out your PET and PVC,
and something like the Olympics would be an ideal standpoint to
be able to actually demonstrate that type of process where you
can apply RFID.
Q630 Lord Crickhowell: We have divided
our evidence today between the academics and those who are dealing
with the other end of the equation and perhaps it is a pity because
on this particular question I note that the waste management company,
Biffa, is giving evidence later. So, noting all this great academic
work and the holistic lifecycle counting of approach, and so on,
they say, "It is our view that product designers and engineers
are blissfully ignorant of end of life impacts arising from the
products they design, and that this coactivity can best be established
by transparent economic producer responsibility." I am rather
sad that we are not having an exchange between them at this moment.
But how would you answer that? Indeed, it has almost been admitted
in some of the evidence that while a lot of work is going on it
is not yet perhaps coming through at the end to the real world.
Do you think that the Biffa comment has an element of truth in
it, or is it unfair?
Dr Swindells: I think it is largely true because—probably
Mr Wilkinson will support me in this—the education of engineers
is predicated on performance; in other words, all of the time
you are talking about the performance of the thing in its main
use, and all the education is about analysis of how to analyse
this performance. And you have to have a different way of thinking
about the thing in the holistic way; you have to have a synthesising
approach, and that has only become relatively new. I personally
conducted research into the methods of separation and recovery
of plastic with RFID tags in 1998 to 2000 and actually my company
has a patent on this. But there are other methods; there is a
UK patented thermal method which has demonstrated the feasibility
of separating lead and brass and zinc and non-metallic alloys
from the mixed waste streams that you get out of the shredders.
The problem is that it is only recently that we have got to the
stage where we have to think of the separation and identification
of separate waste streams, when everything is sent through a shredder
that will smash it all into lots of bits. There is almost no engineering
needed in that kind of situation. So I think that the situation
has changed quite recently and I think that the comment by Biffa
will change.
Mr Wilkinson: I am not an academic, to start
with, and with no intention of being flip I would say in answer
to your question: what do you expect? We are back to accounting
again really. If corporate performances are judged against rewarding
shareholders and we make no attempt to value resource use and
impact on the environment in that accounting procedure, how are
we expected to respond?
Professor Grimes: In terms of producer responsibility
I do have a lot of sympathy with the waste industry and with Biffa's
comments. I think if you are looking at products coming right
through to end of life then the poor waste management industry
has to deal with it and I think there should be an element of
producer responsibility. We are hearing about carbon accounting
and other issues that are there to serve as an economic measure
and I think there is scope for this, to be able to apply it throughout
the chain, and I do support the comment. I think we do need to
take a serious look and I think that producers need to take account
of the sustainability-end of life issue, where and at what point
they are accountable and for how long they are accountable for
end of life products and who takes over that accountability down
the chain. Perhaps we need some education programmes or CPD training
to assist us in trying to bring this problem to a head.
Q631 Baroness Platt of Writtle: What
research is being conducted into the barriers that prevent companies
from making use of existing technology and materials which might
enable waste reduction?
Professor Grimes: I alluded to this in answer
to an earlier question, but I think that the barriers, as I see
it, are the legislative barriers. We have the driver of legislation
but legislation can sometimes be reversed and of course that becomes
a huge handicap in terms of maintaining your competitive advantage.
Also the point about the markets for recyclates is a very clear
issue. And there is the other point about the significant capital
cost that might be required to invest in new technology; and questions
asking about what research has been done to evaluate how these
barriers can be overcome. I am not aware of any particular research
that has been done. I know that there was a time some years ago
that we did research on new technologies that were coming to the
fore, but I think it is time now to look at technology today in
the light of the current legislative regime as to what is likely
to be able to overcome and what will remain as a barrier, and
would be disadvantageous for industry to follow.
Q632 Lord Crickhowell: My final question
is about the legal definition of waste and a number of you raise
this in your papers. There is a very strong thread of criticism
about government policy running through all the papers, both on
the question of definition, on the funding of new methods in the
Imperial College paper; but the real humdinger of criticism comes
in the Institution of Chemical Engineers' evidence, where you
say, "Waste has been the government's bête noire; an
area of grandiose strategy statements and no policy follow through;
hence our position as third worst in Europe for material going
to landfill," and the failure to implement EU Directives
and the need for holistic policy, and so on. I would like you
to widen the answer to this final question perhaps a little beyond
the agreement about the need for a re-definition of waste, to
whether the wider issue of the role of government and government
policy generally is wide enough and where you think we are going
wrong and not doing as well as our European colleagues?
Mr Wilkinson: I think we have just been behind
the game compared to other European countries, and the examples
are quite legion, are they not, which we do not need to go into?
One of our problems has certainly been our planning situation,
our planning regulations and so on, which, for example, have prevented
perhaps the expansion in, say, using waste for energy, for example,
which has happened to a large extent in Germany and a couple of
other European nations. So we have had some clear difficulty there.
We have just finished up with a very poor record for the amount
of material that does go to landfill. Third worst in Europe would
be right.
Q633 Lord Crickhowell: But the big
change that you are looking for would be what, then?
Mr Wilkinson: The now improving waste regulations
are going to start to have an impact, provided that it does not
result in a lot of fly tipping, which seems to be one response.
I think the implementation of some of the directives coming out
of Europe will start to move us to a better situation.
Professor Grimes: If I could just comment? I
think that the single biggest change would be if we actually decided
that waste should only be material destined for final disposal.
I think that anything in between or anything that can be re-used
or recycled should be defined as a non-waste by-product, and I
think nobody got themselves in a bigger problem really than the
EU where in their sixth framework programme they set about a challenge
of "sustainable use of resources and waste management",
and followed that a few years later with a thematic strategy of
waste prevention and recycling, and of course what has actually
happened because of the legislation, where it sits at the moment,
is that where people have the vision or the opportunities to prevent
waste and encourage recycling and the reuse of resources their
hands are tied behind their back because of this definition, because
the implications of the definition, where it excludes the by-product
and is very prescriptive on the waste, means that there is a cost
element that has to be overcome, not least, for example, licensing
of your premises if you are going to be collecting material or
treating material or reusing material in some way. So I think
the single biggest change will be to say, right, waste is material
destined for final disposal; let us open up the opportunity to
say that anything that can be deemed to be within legislative
terms reused, recycled should be defined as a non-waste by-product.
Q634 Lord Crickhowell: You have a
particular criticism of funding and the restrictions placed on
environmental trusts in your paper. Do you want to say any more
about that?
Professor Grimes: I am the beneficiary actually
of landfill trust funding in terms of my post, which is also supported
by The Royal Academy of Engineering, and I think that the difficulty
for my sponsoring Trust is that they are now faced with Landfill
Communities Funds and they are no longer allowed to fund educational
programmes, and I think that we are actually at the heart here
of something which needs education, and that is that we need to
be educated, users need to be educated, industry needs to be educated,
and I think it would be of great benefit if we were able to say,
"Let us look at the Landfill Communities Fund now and say
that this is one area in which we could really direct some funding
which would give benefit back to UK plc and move us forward."
Dr Swindells: I support both of my colleagues
in this. The opinion of The Institute of Materials Minerals and
Mining is that we need a more intelligent definition of waste.
Chairman: Thank you very much for your evidence.
As I say to all of our witnesses, if you have any additional afterthoughts
that you would like to share with us we will be more than happy
to receive them; and we will reserve the right, when we look at
the evidence, to see if there are some things that we want to
hear a bit more about from you and we will get back to you if
we can. You have been extremely helpful this morning and we are
most grateful.
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