Official Report 270KB pdf
We will now resume work on our national waste plan inquiry. This is the second of four scheduled evidence-taking sessions. Last week we were given an introductory overview. Today we will explore the practical and local problems associated with making progress on the plan, including market development, waste minimisation and urban/rural differences. Having read the written evidence that has been submitted in advance, members will be keen to ask questions.
I will pick up where we left off. Both papers that have been submitted refer to problems associated with planning. You have made it clear that the kinds of developments that are necessary to make radical changes in waste management are likely to run up against problems in the current planning system. As you know, consultation is taking place on and consideration is being given to what may ultimately be radical changes to the planning process in Scotland. It is important that you clarify your concerns for us and indicate what you would like to happen with planning when it comes to the development of waste-handling facilities in the future.
This morning we heard the concerns of residents of both Greengairs and Roslin. The industry believes that whatever type of planning application it submits, for whatever type of facility, it will encounter opposition. People are concerned about issues such as vehicle movements, as a minimum.
As the committee heard from the petitioners, the history of waste disposal in Scotland has mainly been one of landfill. The national waste plan is designed to minimise the amount of waste that goes to landfill. We are at the beginning of a journey to meet European targets by 2020. That journey will require us to put in place an infrastructure that allows us to divert waste from landfill. That will involve planning applications for transfer stations and various technologies, with the residue of waste going to landfill. If we want to deliver by 2020, the big picture must be kept in mind.
Can you say more about transfer stations and so on? Might local people object to having those facilities in their area, in the same way as they object to landfill? Can you be more specific about your proposals?
In our experience as an industry, we find that, irrespective of how minimal the impact of a development on a community may be, direct objections tend to be made to any planning application for a waste management facility. I could provide examples, but it is not appropriate for me to mention them here. Extensive objections were made even to a planning application for a small transfer station receiving very little domestic waste from a local community—40 tonnes a day, which amounts to two truck loads. That issue must be faced if we want to deliver the national waste strategy.
One of your recommendations is that waste strategy areas should be statutory consultees for the development plan process. Would that tie the process together more effectively? There is clearly an issue about engaging the community in the wider overall waste management strategy, which the previous petitioners mentioned. How do you think including the areas as statutory consultees would take us further ahead?
Given that the waste strategy areas involve councils, they should involve communities. A number of parties should be involved. If they become statutory consultees, we get more ownership of the process as the planning applications go through.
Various local authorities are included in each area. The delivery of the national waste strategy in each area should involve liaison with councils so that the area, rather than just individual communities, are considered.
One of the frustrations of professional officers in the institution—from private industry, local authorities and SEPA—is that when a planning application is made for a particular facility, whether for landfill or more modern technologies, the planning process appears not to keep up with the processes and procedures that the waste management industry has to go through. It is almost as if in some instances the planning process holds back the development of advanced waste management facilities.
Do you have examples of that happening?
There are a number of examples of that. In Aberdeen, a new energy-from-waste plant is being proposed. At the moment the professional officers in both the council and the company concerned are finding it difficult to obtain planning permission. A planning application for a materials recycling facility—nothing more—was made in Stirling three years ago, but has only recently been made the subject of a public inquiry. The plan was turned down initially because of planning objections—even though SEPA and the rest of the local authority in Stirling approved the plan—and it is now awaiting the outcome of the reporter's inquiry.
Are you advocating a strategic consideration of land in each area that would identify areas in advance and zone them specifically for waste management or treatment of some sort?
We are definitely looking for that type of thing to happen. We could identify areas in the development plans for waste treatment or waste disposal. Let us identify those areas clearly. We do that for housing and minerals. Why not do it for waste as well?
Would you identify areas for waste management of some sort and leave the particular nature of that to be decided in future? The area might subsequently be used for a recycling facility or for an incinerator.
That is the approach that we would take. Areas should be identified for waste, as we do for housing—
But when any subsequent plan for an incinerator came up for approval, people would be unable to object to it fundamentally, because the area had already been zoned.
That is right. In principle, the land use would have been established. There would obviously be an environmental impact assessment as part of the process, but at least the area of land would be identified.
Why does one community—such as Greengairs—have to have three or four different landfills?
That is a good point. To answer the question, we must look back 100 years. Greengairs was established because coal, fire-clay and other minerals could be won there. As a result, communities sprang up in the area. Greengairs is an example of one such community. In West Lothian, because of the oil shale workings, communities sprang up all over the place. Some still exist, whereas some have gone. Mineral winning has created voids that the waste industry and society have decided to use for waste. Parts of Harthill were taking ash from Edinburgh in the 1930s, when waste was being incinerated. This is an historical development—it is not of our making. We must go where the geology allows and where minerals have been won. In some areas we end up with communities that are close to landfill operations because, historically, those communities developed to win minerals.
Will that be the case in future, given that there will be different technologies and greater emphasis on composting, recycling and reuse? What will be the future footprint for waste? I do not ask you to specify individual communities, but what the future pattern will be, given the importance of proximity and other sustainable development issues, such as transport. Will facilities be located at existing developments, or is there an opportunity to do something different?
The national waste plan is designed to reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfill, but we must accept in principle that a residue of material will always have to be disposed of in that way. Waste treatment could be carried out on industrial estates, because we have the ability and technology to develop facilities that can handle material under cover, in buildings, with air control. The situation will change, but a landfill-type process will always be needed.
I want to add something about the alternative waste processes. Where populations are dense, there will be a greater need for facilities. However, the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management believes that there is no fundamental reason that those should not be spread around the country, for the sake of proximity. As we said in our submission, everything depends on how the Parliament defines proximity for Scotland.
I am interested in your theory of community win for former coal mining villages. I represent a number of such villages, and there is not much community win for them. They do not have employment or facilities. Con Kerwin's notion of the win that those communities had bears no resemblance to what I see on the ground.
I have not made myself understood very well. I meant that communities had been developed to dig minerals—to win them from the ground. I did not mean that the communities had gained from that process in any way. Historically, a small village would develop around a coal mine or opencast site to win minerals. People lived in the area because employment had been created. I hope that I have made my meaning clear.
You still have not answered the question about why you, as companies, do not exercise some kind of social control. When the Greengairs site opened in 1988, you knew that if you put waste half a mile away from a village the smell would get out. Why do companies not exercise some kind of social control without laws needing to be in place?
That takes us back to Con Kerwin's answer. Where the holes in the ground are is where we need to go for landfill. We and you rely on the planning systems and the legislation to control such issues as the one that you raise. Environmental impact surveys of sites should take into account the impact of landfill on the community. The planning processes and the environmental legislation should deal with such issues.
In other words, you try it on. You find a hole in the ground that is 500m from a village and try to get planning permission to use it. The local quarry owner or landowner thinks that that is a great idea, as they can get money out of it. That is what happens all the time. I can think of three places in the Highlands where that has happened. Do you not think that there should be a better way of doing it than that? Should not the views of the communities be taken into consideration right from the start? Instead of trying to push it through, should you not think first about the effect on the community of your filling with waste a quarry that is on their back doorstep?
I take issue with the idea that we try it on. We try to provide a service to society. Yes, we do it to make a living, provide jobs and make a profit; I have no problem with that. However, we also provide a service.
The facilities need to be in proximity to the main waste arisings. Unfortunately, that tends to be in centres of population. We do not try it on with planning applications. It costs thousands of pounds to go from the beginning of a submission to a public inquiry, if that is necessary. We would not try it on with a planning application. We would approach the planning department and ask for a review of the site, its availability and the likelihood of our getting planning consent. If that review concluded that we would be unlikely to get planning consent, that the site was not zoned for such purposes and that a landfill site would not fit with the local plan, we would not proceed with an application.
You have concerns that, in the way in which they are applied and developed, the regulations are not keeping up with need and not making your job easier. In your submission, you talk about the Official Journal of the European Union laying down waste acceptance criteria although
I am happy to look at that. We need to be up to speed with the latest legislation. We have concerns about the implementation of the landfill directive and about conditioning plans. Scotland was behind England with a submission date for those plans. It is important that we get the legislation in statute so that we can get on with it and manage the process; otherwise, all that will happen is that the time will get squeezed further and further and we will end up having to push something forward.
Does the institution think that there are problems in tackling things because of that delay?
One of the problems is that there has been a rush of regulation from Europe on waste management, and the national waste strategy has brought considerable pressures to bear on the Executive and on SEPA, which produce guidance documents. They have been struggling. I was at a meeting with SEPA last week at which we identified 31 guidance documents that were being consulted on between June and November. They are not thin documents. It takes long enough just to print them, let alone to read them and comment on them. I shudder to think what the poor souls who have to write them go through.
It is an area of government in which questions are being raised about whether the resources exist to apply such regulations. I hope that we can bear that in mind.
We talked about the catch-up issue during a previous meeting.
The institution's submission states:
I am not sure that it is the institution's business to suggest alternatives. The experience to date on waste public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives is that they seem to take an awful long time to bear fruit. It can take years to get there and lots of money from both the public and private sectors. Both the local authorities that are involved in PFIs and the contractors who bid for them have to employ all manner of consultants, and they do not come cheap. There is, ultimately, a certain element of the banks taking over, and banks in the UK are very concerned about risk. They seem to be especially risk averse in waste projects—north of the border, if not south of the border. If things have to happen quickly, PFI might not be the mechanism to deliver that. There are other procurement methods, which would perhaps deliver quickly, but that remains to be seen.
What are the other suggestions for the procurement of new facilities?
There is a facility whereby a company tenders simply for a service. That service could be operated on a gate-fee basis and would achieve more or less the same aim as PFI—I think, from my limited knowledge of PFI—which is a reduction in capital investment by the public sector.
One of the small problems with PFI is the fact that the contracts that have been signed so far, or which are currently being negotiated, tend to run over fairly lengthy periods of time—20 to 25 years. The problem that some of the officers of the institution sometimes have with that process is that a solution that is being proposed now might in 15 years' time, never mind 25 years' time, be totally inappropriate. However, because of the expense and the type of technology that may or may not have to be used, the partnership agreement between the private sector and, for example, the local authority requires a length of time to be set to enable the return on any capital investment to be achieved. The dichotomy is between identifying the length of contract that meets the requirements for the delivery of the plan and ensuring that the plan is not out of date by the time that the contract finishes.
The industry has found that, when councils put out to tender contracts that will run until 2020, they want to incorporate the risk transfer of achieving those targets to the private sector, which is bidding for the contracts. In so doing, they need to cover 2010, 2013 and 2020. That is why the contracts tend to run for a longer period. A major issue is the fact that the banks will not fund such a project unless there are guarantees that it will meet those targets.
So what is your suggestion? Both your submissions make points about new technologies coming through all the time, but we are also faced with trying to move away from the existing reliance on landfill. How do local authorities and area waste teams manage the conflict between achieving fairly swift results over the next three years with major investment, and being able to upgrade or perhaps totally change facilities or processes within five or 10 years?
The North and South Lanarkshire tender that is out at the moment is a negotiated partnership, not a PFI. One of the difficulties with the PFI and PPP systems is that they were originally designed for building new build, such as schools and hospitals, which bears no relationship to building an infrastructure to deal with waste. The couple of PFIs for waste that have been tendered recently include old landfill sites that need to be brought up to standard to meet the landfill directive. There is a contamination risk with those old sites, and trying to fit such projects into a PFI system that was designed to deliver schools and hospitals is a difficult process.
Can you give us a bit more information? With negotiated partnerships is there a point, say at five years in, when the local authority can say, "A new technology is available. We'd like to incorporate it"? Would they then have to set up a totally new partnership, or could such a change be accommodated by the partnerships that are currently being established?
Any partnership will need a project agreement between the client and the contractor to define what the contractor promises to deliver to the client. There needs to be flexibility in the project agreement to take account of new technologies, deliveries and targets, because in 2020 nothing will be the same as it is today.
I presume that it would be possible to incorporate references to best available technology in contracts.
Yes. The difficulty is that one has to start with a basket of solutions that will deliver the 2010, 2013 and 2020 targets. However, there has to be flexibility within that to deal with the growth or minimisation of waste. A range of issues has to be dealt with in the project agreement to allow flexibility between the contractor and the client.
So what is the best solution to the dilemma of looking into the future and not being able to use new technology because it is not in the contract?
I agree that PFI/PPP is an ill fit for waste management, and that a negotiated partnership with a project agreement is a better way forward.
Is the problem the fact that we are trying to allocate risk and nobody wants to take it on? Which stakeholders should take on part of the risk? Do we need people to be a bit more up front about saying, "Okay, hands up, we've got to do it", and to just get on with it?
In our experience, obviously the client wants to transfer the risk that goes with the technology. The banks, as we all know, do not want any risk. The risk is a commercial risk that is normally taken in the contract by the private sector, but it is a calculated risk.
In addition, in the area that we are moving into—where recycling, waste minimisation and reuse will be the terms that we use—quite a bit of the risk lies with the public and cannot be transferred either to the local authority or a private contractor. Much is said about risk transfer, to which perhaps the Scottish Environmental Services Association does not wholly subscribe. The important point is that there will be elements of risk transfer if and when a local authority contracts work out. However, some risk remains and cannot be transferred from the public.
One of the other issues that we should consider is direct charging. As we suggested in our written evidence, charging the public for waste services would focus the mind. Direct charging involves community groups and makes them aware of what is happening—they see what they are paying for. We could start with a flat-rate charging system, which would become more sophisticated as recycling rates increased. That would help to spread the risk and bring the public close to the process.
How do you envisage voluntary effort and community groups integrating with the professionals in the waste business? Much of the recycling that happens at the moment is the result of voluntary effort and community groups.
We welcome the work of community groups, because they do pump-priming work—for example, in education. As we said in our written evidence, in the long term the involvement of large organisations that have the ability to bring resources to bear will be needed to deliver the national waste plan. However, there will always be a place for community groups, especially in smaller communities where access is a difficulty.
The Chartered Institution of Wastes Management agrees whole-heartedly with that view. The community should, and hopefully will, play its part. We need to find a niche for community groups and to enable communities to do what they can through funding delivered by the strategic waste fund.
In some community schemes, there is a significant amount of protected employment. Do you think that the profession should be asked to take on part of that social obligation? Obviously, it would be paid to do so from the public purse, which is a consideration. Would your taking on, in part and at a price, the social obligation for that stream of protected employment be a possible way forward?
In our written evidence, we suggested that Scotland will have to make a decision about the value of social inclusion and of having community groups do X, Y and Z when that could be done more cheaply by the local authority or a private contractor. In my experience, where community groups work they are a valuable addition to the overall plan. However, they must find their niche within the big picture. They will not deliver the national waste plan. The need for us all to make a decision about the value of the things that community groups do as compared with simple provision of a service was evidenced only a couple of weeks ago, when a community group in Stirling lost a contract to collect glass.
Many community groups are supported financially by initiatives such as the landfill tax credit scheme, which is coming to an end. Given that there is still uncertainty about what will replace the scheme and how the money will be devolved, it is difficult to see how some community groups will be able to continue their activity, as they have employees who need to be paid. In some rural locations, in particular, recycling is not financially viable but is being done for the good of the community. One must accept that for such recycling to work it will have to be subsidised financially in some way.
We have covered many of the points that I wanted to make, but I want to touch on the financial issue surrounding waste management. It is clear that the industry is perceived as one that will always need to be supported by public resources to carry on the job that it does on behalf of the public—disposal of waste. That was made clear again in the evidence that we took earlier on landfill sites.
I am not clear where the idea comes from that we rely on subsidies and handouts. The industry charges a gate fee. We dispose of waste and then take on the environmental responsibility for looking after that waste for perhaps 30 or 50 years. We charge the council a fee for that service. The only revenue that we take from the public purse is for the service that we provide. We will hear from the Waste and Resources Action Programme and people like that about developing markets, closing the loop and generating income streams from the materials that we recover.
At the risk of giving away my age, I will say that I have been in this business for 40 years. I remember being taken to Polmadie to see a picking line. Recycling was going on at that time. Since then, there have been various peaks when paper was required and recyclate found a home; at other times, we could not get rid of it at all. Therefore, in any business plan, it would be dangerous to assume a continuous income stream.
So, will the public purse remain the prime support mechanism?
Local authorities face a significant and growing cost in dealing with waste in line with the national waste strategy and the landfill directive.
We are making assumptions about contamination from materials that could be recycled. Is there evidence—from other places where material is collected and from starter schemes here—of how much contamination is likely? Witnesses from Glasgow City Council last week seemed surprised at the low level of contamination that they were getting.
We have quite a lot of data on the relative levels of contamination that might be expected, depending on the method of recycling. The closer to home the method, the cleaner the material tends to be. The institution's view is that having clean materials delivered by the public is not beyond our wit. We should be moving in that direction. I do not want us to produce more waste so please do not take this the wrong way, but because we do not produce huge quantities of waste in certain parts of Scotland, we should be aiming to get premium grade recyclate from the public. I am reasonably sanguine, as are the membership of the institution, that we can achieve that in time.
I agree—in time. The industry's experience to date has been of contamination of between 5 per cent and 60 per cent, depending on the method of collection. I agree with my colleagues that the aim is to get that down to a minimum. However, local authorities in Scotland will remain the people who collect the material. Resources must be put into that front-end collection to achieve the aim that Colin Clark spoke about.
Thank you for coming along. We have covered a lot of ground and your written submissions have been extremely useful. The committee has two further panels of witnesses to hear from this morning, so we will have a short break to allow people to move to the table.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
We will start with the second panel of witnesses. I welcome Douglas Boyle, from the Composting Association Scotland, Steve Creed, the director of business development and procurement at the Waste and Resources Action Programme, and Duncan Simpson, from Recycling Market Development—Remade Scotland. Duncan is here in place of Professor Jim Baird, whose name appears on our agenda.
First, I thank the committee for inviting WRAP to give evidence today; we are pleased to be here.
It is useful for us to remember that when we consider waste minimisation, which came up at a previous meeting. If we do not reduce the amount of waste that we produce, it will become an increasingly bigger task to create new recycling opportunities. Witnesses at a previous meeting made that point effectively.
We have been talking about stimulating the procurement of goods from recycled products. I wonder how far down the line you are on that. I am particularly interested in public agencies' procurement policies because, from my point of view, it is the obvious place to start.
That is an attractive target. In that context, people often talk about low-hanging fruit, but it is difficult to pick. The public sector offers many opportunities for recycling because the sector as a whole is focused on sustainable procurement. Energy and other matters are high on the sector's agenda, but recycled products are lower on its agenda. Recycled paper is a common product, but we want to do more than just recycle paper.
I will shift the subject to composting. During our evidence session last week, we discussed composting several times and I am keen to have an impression of the proportion of Scotland's municipal waste stream that could be recycled through composting. Will you expand on the disposal or use of composted material, given the issues about the disposal of sewage industry products, for example, and the question whether the market—if it can be called a market—exists to take the material that is created?
I like the phrase "if it can be called a market", because it raises an important issue for the Composting Association Scotland and the UK Composting Association, which is our parent body.
Could you give me more detail on what will go into compost? Are we talking just about vegetable waste? Are we talking about animal waste? Are we talking about human waste and fish waste? How will non-vegetable materials be treated?
Anything that is non-vegetable waste—I presume you refer to animal waste—will have to be treated under the Animal By-Products (Scotland) Regulations 2003. The whole composting industry, along with the state veterinary service, has been working hard to develop hazard procedures, hazard analysis and critical control point procedures so that we meet the aspirations of the state veterinary service and the necessary sanitisation criteria that it is imposing. Composting will do that. A proper process that is properly managed will achieve the sanitisation that the state veterinary service requires.
Having lived for a number of years not far from a knackery, where beef and bone meal are produced for fertiliser, I am slightly anxious about the processes.
Such materials would be category 2 materials under the Animal By-Products (Scotland) Regulations 2003 and would not go to composting plants without being pre-treated according to criteria that are laid down in the regulations, specifically in order to safeguard animal health.
What about human health? We heard earlier from people who were complaining about odour nuisance. I seek reassurances that facilities that are close to villages will not treat human and animal waste, which would impact on the health and well-being of people.
The odour issue is controlled by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the waste management licensing system, and animal health is controlled by the state veterinary service. The whole point of composting is to take organic residues that would normally go to landfill, which produce the majority of odours and gasses, and to stabilise them by processing them under enclosed conditions. That is what the new regulations will require. The hope is that that will render landfill sites more benign because the residual materials will be treated in a controlled manner.
At the start of the questioning, an issue was mentioned on which Remade Scotland has tried to move forward with WRAP and others, which is that there is no real recycling until people can buy recycled goods. In order to buy recycled, people need to be reassured that the product that they are buying performs and has value for them—it needs to have reliability and a guarantee.
But those materials must be processed as well.
Absolutely.
Your written evidence suggests that what you do is on a big scale, but the evidence that we heard earlier today suggested that much community recycling and composting is not cost-effective and that it would be more economical if it all just went away. What is your view on that?
One thing that we have set up in relation to composting is PAS 100, which allows people to operate at quite small activity levels. We have had several applications from smaller organisations as well as from larger ones. In fact, proper green-waste composting can be run on a smaller scale. Depending on the materials that are being produced, the products that come out of composting can be sold locally.
That partially answers the question that I was about to ask. We talk about composting, but that covers a wide spectrum of treatments and ways of doing things. It would be quite useful to have an outline of all the different things that we mean by composting.
Indeed. It is important to distinguish composting as a process from compost as a horticultural product that is bought from the garden centre. A range of end products come from the composting process with a range of qualities that depend on the inputs and on the intensity of the composting process that is used. As Steve Creed indicated, composting is operated from the community scale right up to the large industrial scale. Let us hope that that continues to be the case.
It would be useful to have more details, nonetheless.
I am interested in developing two issues. From the direction of the debate, it is obvious that we are looking for people to take responsibility. Ideas relating to composting in industrial units, for example, could also relate to larger communities and towns. We can discuss that matter presently.
Industry, local government and central government put an onus on corporate social responsibility, social responsibility or collective responsibility. Recycling allows the industry to go to householders and get them to look into their bins, rather than allow them to put the responsibility on someone else's shoulders by saying, "You take care of that for me. I trust you." The responsibility for such work lies in our communities—that is why we are having this debate today. Recycling provides a simple tool with which to put forward sustainability arguments. Industry will take on a social responsibility, but it is hard for it to do that, because it must try to balance short-term pressures to achieve set targets with the long-term aspiration of overall benefit.
Targets are often economic, and benefits are often about quality of life and sustainability. It is vital that we find ways to measure those so that they are part of our overall monitoring of the waste strategy. Can your activities pinpoint any aspects of quality of life? Duncan Simpson has mentioned making householders more aware and making them look inside their bins. Does anyone else have any other comments?
We are working in a commercial environment. Ultimately, at some point, we have to create wealth to solve a problem that we have created for ourselves, which is that we tend to throw away more and more—as our gross domestic product goes up, our waste levels go up. We have an opportunity to use that economic activity to generate wealth that will turn around the problem for us.
We will pick up the employment, economic and financial issues when we hear witnesses from the Confederation of British Industry and the Federation of Small Businesses next week.
We have to be wary of that. Obviously, we do not know what regulations might be created in the future, so it is hard to look into a crystal ball and give an answer. In trying to reach a certain level of recycling at this stage, we must be careful not to move to lower-value applications too soon. We could be putting off a problem that we might face later.
Again, glass is a good example. As well as chairing Remade Scotland, I work for one of the compliance schemes. Remade Scotland worked hard to open up an alternative end market for remelt. We wanted to create choice in the marketplace, so that the material would have value again, because at one stage its price was zero. That choice has appeared. There are entrepreneurs who can take glass and make it into a water filtration medium or abrasive. If such an entrepreneur were to be successful in landing a 30,000-tonne order to provide a water filtration medium of a set specification for Scottish Water, they would need 30,000 tonnes of glass. That is the kind of issue that Steve Creed is talking about. The order would fall through if we did not have the collections. Businessmen and entrepreneurs in Scotland are trying to balance the material that is coming out with demand and the guarantee that they will have to give to the businessmen who want to buy the material at the other end.
In my constituency, the glass-recycling facility was taken away because people putting bottles in it destroyed residents' quality of life. The other streams are slightly easier to separate at source. Do you have views on what we should be doing with glass? Should we have on-street glass recycling or should we have glass recycling at supermarkets? What are the clever solutions?
I hope that Steve Creed will help me on how to go forward on glass. Remade Scotland believes that, within the UK, we need to go out and get nearly 1 million tonnes of glass. Glass comes from two types of place—pubs, clubs and restaurants and our houses. To collect glass from a bring-to bank—a recycling centre—costs between £25 a tonne and £40 a tonne. To collect it from a pub, club or restaurant costs between £35 a tonne and £65 a tonne. To collect it from the kerbside costs from £85 a tonne, to as much as someone is prepared to pay to get contamination levels down and to separate the glass at the kerbside. There are probably 50,000 pubs and clubs in the United Kingdom from which it is economically viable to collect glass. They generate 400,000 tonnes of glass, which tells me that we need to collect glass from them all.
WRAP is working on programmes to assess different collection techniques, including running trials for pub collections from licensed premises to consider all the issues of noise, storage and so on. To make it work we might need to have four collections from pubs and clubs on a Friday night, because they cannot store the glass. We are considering how the different collection techniques work and we are developing a programme to assess those approaches. I have seen several innovative approaches to collecting glass at bring-to sites, which reduce the noise and the number of times that the glass has to be collected, for example by grinding the glass up while it is in the storage device. That has not quite made it to the market yet, but I am aware of people who are trying very hard to get there. That opportunity is coming.
There are two more questions, which I suspect have been sparked off by the glass question.
Are we pitching our efforts at recycling glass at the wrong point in the waste hierarchy? Should we be considering re-using glass bottles as bottles rather than breaking them up into broken glass?
Absolutely. I want every single remelt plant to take as much glass as it possibly can. I want them to do that day in, day out, because the more they demand it, the more value there is. However, the UK produces 80 per cent clear material and we collect 80 per cent green material, and we cannot make clear glass from the green material. There is a need for alternatives to complement the foundation of the industry, which is glass remelt. Colleagues in the glass remelt sector would, I hope, understand that Remade Scotland, WRAP and others see them as a key means of achieving the targets for the future. They must be seen to use their technology to put more material into the furnace. There is no doubt that there need to be alternatives, because alternatives can offer choice and improve the environmental impact in rural areas. There is a very applicable market for choice in those areas, where it would probably benefit the community. A balance is required, but I would like every bottle to go to remelt.
You mention bottles going to remelt, but what about bottles going back and being refilled?
Do you mean reuse?
Yes. We are talking about moving up the hierarchy.
I agree. To go one stage higher, the waste packaging regulations and the fact that the cost of waste disposal is increasing have caused companies—for the commercial reasons that Steve Creed mentioned—to say that if they can reduce the amount of raw material that they put in, they will be able to lightweight bottles. Companies have lightweighted bottles to levels that we have not seen before. They will continue to do that because it saves the business money and allows them to sell the product to us more cheaply, so they can compete. Taking in recycled content benefits the companies in energy savings.
It worries me that we are going for recycling when we need the guaranteed secondary resource to fuel the recycling industry. Perhaps we should put the same effort into reuse. All the distribution and filling plants and so on can get everything out there. Why can they not get it back again? If we put the same effort and money into doing that, would we not have a better outcome in the long term?
The point that has been made is that the industry has now moved on. Unfortunately, we no longer have a local dairy that delivers milk to our doorstep in all cases. There are much larger conurbations of people and plastic bottles are used instead. People have moved to a different alternative. Now if we want to utilise resources effectively, we need to get the plastic bottles back and use them again for something else. It would be difficult to turn the economic tide on all that. The industry would find it difficult because it has become global. Most products that people buy and consume come from organisations that are not in the United Kingdom, let alone Scotland. Often, they are located somewhere in Europe. Wine bottles are a classic example of that.
But we are in the European Union. If we can organise that wine coming to me in a green bottle, can we not organise the green bottle going back to be filled up? Could that not be done if we put the same amount of money and effort into organising such a return system as we put into taking the green bottle, melting it and remaking it or smashing it into aggregate?
Then we would have twice the transportation costs. We would have to consider whether that was an environmentally friendly activity.
We are moving to whole life things.
Exactly. I am not saying that it would not work.
We could perhaps use the green bottle five or six times. I cannot remember how often a milk bottle could be used; I think that it was about 20 times.
The point is that it depends on how thick the milk bottle is. Milk bottles could be used many times because they were solid, like the old Coke bottles. I remember from my youth in North America that those were reused and they went round and round. That was very effective.
We might capture that point for our conclusions, because one of the things that we want to do with our report is to communicate with the European Union, which is examining product design and waste minimisation and management issues. That might be an issue to put back to the EU.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
I open our third and final panel session. Last but not least, I welcome Liz Partington, head of recycling at the Lothian and Edinburgh Environmental Partnership; Stephen Cooper, head of environmental services at Lerwick Waste to Energy Plant; and Susan Carstairs, development officer at the Lochaber Environmental Group.
How does what the local groups were doing before now fit in with councils taking over a lot of waste management? What aspects of local groups' hitherto successful operations are under threat of being taken over by the council?
We are moving into a different situation. What we were doing before is relevant to some extent, but we are now being given the chance to do a lot more. Community groups have been doing a lot of different things. I divide the work into waste minimisation, which is about home composting, reuse and waste minimisation, and collection and processing, in which fewer large community groups are involved. I do not know much about collection and processing, because those have not been part of our experience.
Community groups such as LEEP have delivered an enormous amount of good practice and have been at the forefront of developing and delivering sustainable waste management during the past 20 years, which the question acknowledged. The national waste strategy reiterates that community groups should be part of the process. We agree because we have been doing this for 20 years or more.
Everything that I wanted to ask the community groups has been answered. We are conscious of the dichotomy between economics and the social and educational work that such groups do. We will have to consider that when we write our report.
The waste-to-energy plant in Shetland has been a success. Because Shetland is so remote and has a dispersed population, the cost of waste collection and management is one of the main issues. Any solutions that we come up with tend to focus on finding a local solution. One reason why we opted for a waste-to-energy plant was our particular need for district heating. We are not on the national grid, and the costs of producing electricity by burning oil at the local power station are high. Therefore, our decision was driven by need.
How many people benefit from the district heating scheme?
About 500 premises—equivalent to 500 houses—including hospitals and schools are currently in the scheme. There is the potential for a further 1,000 premises—equivalent to 1,000 houses—to come into the scheme, out of a potential 4,000 houses in the Lerwick area.
If the amount of rubbish that you burn grows and grows, you will be able to heat more and more homes. Is that how you look at it?
Not at all. The plant is designed for a particular throughput of waste. We seek to supplement the waste with other renewable sources. Some waste oil or waste heat might come out of the power station, which can top up what we are already producing. The important thing is that we have an infrastructure in place that delivers heat to houses, hospitals and businesses. As the infrastructure is there, we can supplement the waste with alternative sources of heat. The waste issue was the catalyst to putting the infrastructure in place in the first place.
Would you recommend your methods to other communities as a way of solving their waste problems?
It is probably not appropriate for all areas. Our remote location is a benefit. There might be a place for incineration and energy recovery where there are specific waste streams, for which a plant can be designed. We have designed our plant for a mixed waste stream, which I think is right for our circumstances, although it is perhaps not right for all circumstances.
Every member wishes to come in on that, so I will patiently work round you all, starting with Alex Johnstone.
I have just heard the answers to most of the questions that I was going to ask. However, I will add one or two points and see whether we can get one or two more answers. What is the level of emission from the plant? Is there smoke billowing out all the time, or is there a system in place that ensures that the combustion process effectively removes pollutants?
We operate within the emission standards imposed on us, and we have never had a single breach of those standards. We are aware that new standards will come out at the end of 2005 and we already have equipment in place to ensure that we will meet them. I am fairly confident that what we put out comes well within the standards that apply.
We spoke earlier to people who are objecting to a landfill site. We heard all the complaints about lorry movements, odours and so on that we would expect to hear about a plant such as the one with which you are associated. Do you get complaints about those issues, or do you find that any such complaints are mitigated by the substantial public benefit for those living adjacent to the plant?
During the three years I have been in Shetland, I recall hearing only one complaint, which was to do with the colour of the plume coming from the stack. I think that it was something to do with the light on the day in question—it was a misperception. That aside, we do not get any complaints at all. The plant is located away from the town, so there is no direct impact on people living close by. There have been very few complaints.
You mentioned the status of bottom ash as a covering material, which is an aspect of the regulations that has obviously changed. Will you comment on that matter a little more?
We use the bottom ash from the waste energy plant as covering material on the landfill site. However, it is likely that such activity will no longer contribute to our recycling target. At the moment, we can argue that the use of bottom ash should go towards our recycling target because it is a substitute for virgin material that we would otherwise have to bring in. That debate will continue. If we are not allowed to put bottom ash use towards our recycling target, our recycling rate will fall to 5 per cent.
How long has the facility been in operation?
Since early 2000.
From what you have learned over the past three years, do you think it would be easy to translate this type of facility to a comparable area such as my own area of the Western Isles? What would be the cost of putting in the infrastructure? Have you learned any harsh lessons about efficiency?
It might be possible to translate the facility to areas such as the Western Isles. However, one would need to know what the needs and circumstances were, and I am obviously not in a position to comment on that.
Would the facility's viability be threatened in any way if the oil industry was not present in the area?
The income that was generated in Shetland from the oil industry certainly helped to pay for the plant. We also received European funding. These plants do not come cheap and I am not sure—
How much did the plant cost?
The plant itself cost £10 million and the district heating infrastructure cost another £10 million. If a council is not in a position to pay out that kind of money for such a big project, it might have to consider some of the options that were discussed earlier, such as PFI and PPP. However, there are risks associated with such an approach. For example, banks see waste-to-energy proposals as high-risk ventures.
One of the major arguments against incineration is the volume of waste that is needed to make it practicable. What tonnage of waste do you need to operate the plant and what percentage is that of your waste stream?
We are currently putting through about 20,000 or 22,000 tonnes. At the moment, 50 per cent of the Shetland waste arisings that we receive goes to the waste-to-energy plant, 30 per cent goes to landfill and 20 per cent goes to recycling, which includes bottom ash. We hope that from 2006, once we improve the recycling infrastructure, 50 per cent of the waste will still go to the waste-to-energy plant, 20 per cent will go to landfill and 30 per cent will go to recycling.
Was the plant designed to take that volume of waste?
Yes. Once a plant is designed for a particular throughput, that has to be maintained.
How much pre-treatment or sorting do you have to do to the waste? Also, does the fly ash have to be disposed of at some point?
There is no pre-treatment of the waste going into the waste energy plant. Fly ash is regarded as hazardous waste and is sent to a landfill.
How much do you depend on waste from Orkney? What relationship do you have with Orkney Islands Council in that regard?
We need that waste. As I said before, the waste energy plant is designed for a particular throughput and if we did not maintain that, the viability of the plant would be jeopardised.
Does the council pay you or do you pay it?
It pays us.
I am aware that this waste energy plant is a rural one and that Dundee's experience is quite different. Its incineration plant is much older and has been less reliable. There have been issues relating to community involvement and Friends of the Earth Scotland has been involved in running the plant.
The Lothian and Edinburgh Environmental Partnership helped to set up the Edinburgh furniture initiative, which is one of the best examples of a furniture reuse project and was quoted in the area waste plan for Lothian and the Borders.
Reuse is on the agenda in other countries. In Denmark, for example, it is built into the infrastructure of local communities and is seen as a value, and there is training and direct community feed through. We do not have a reuse target, because we do not have a dedicated group of people dealing with reuse of materials. We have been considering the targets in the national waste action plan, so I am posing that question, in a sense, to leave it on the table. Having dealt with constituents, I can see the community benefits and the logic of what is proposed, but without a target and without reuse being valued as something that is worth chasing, nobody will do it and it will happen only as a voluntary community activity.
Setting a target would be absolutely doable. The Community Recycling Network for Scotland has employed a furniture co-ordinator, who is being funded jointly by the CRNS and by Communities Scotland. Statistics have been pulled together on how many furniture groups there are and what their tonnage is, and SEPA and a group called Grangemouth Enterprises Ltd, which has been working on furniture reuse for a long time, have worked out between them a table for estimating tonnage. We need to pull everything together and to be able to say to people, "If you're doing furniture, here's how to collect it and here's how to systematise the information." We are nearly there, and it would be easy to set up standards.
We shall try to pick up on that and plug it into our work. That would be most useful.
We must be careful how we define furniture recycling and reuse and what we include in any assessment. For example, an antiques dealer could be called a furniture recycler, although that would be taking it a bit far, but the private sector operates in the recycling of furniture at a level below what would be described as antiques dealing. An awful lot of people out there in the private sector are buying and selling furniture at relatively low cost. Would your criteria have any way of calculating the contribution that they make to the recycling of furniture?
Yes, that could be done. It would be important to include that sector.
How do you get past some of the barriers to reuse? How do you reach the current standards for furniture and for white goods? Is that difficult?
There is a national organisation called the Furniture Recycling Network, which is based in Bristol and has done an awful lot of helpful work on standards. It has spoken to the Government and the European Union about trying to include reuse when the detail of the directive on waste electrical and electronic equipment is set.
I agree. I have some knowledge of that work as well. If the furniture is to be passed on to people who have no income and therefore cannot purchase the items, it will come down to a cost-per-tonne analysis. That is how the funding mechanism works and it is somewhat prohibitive to community groups'—or any groups'—continuing that kind of service. I reiterate my point that it is impossible to measure how much each tonne of waste that is saved from going to landfill is also benefiting people who, for example, have experienced homelessness and are returning to accommodation.
There must be other areas of reuse apart from furniture. For example, there are lots of projects to reuse information technology equipment. Have we any way of finding out how many such schemes there are for reusing different kinds of materials? Where would we get those statistics? We will want to explore that issue.
As Susan Carstairs said, the Community Recycling Network Scotland has been undertaking a mapping exercise—
That is not just for furniture.
No. The CRNS is collating all the information on community groups and other people who are working in that field. The network would, therefore, be the first organisation to speak to if you wanted to find out the tonnage of things that are being reused or recycled in Scotland.
The furniture reuse sector is good for statistics, as it deals with things that can be measured. We should ensure that we do that as well as we can, and set targets and so on. However, I make a plea not to leave out the education side of it. Education is crucial to achieving a change in attitude in Scotland towards the idea of sustainability. We must either get cleverer about targets or use our judgment and allow ourselves to do things that have open-ended results.
I agree whole-heartedly with what Susan Carstairs says. Education and waste minimisation, which cannot be measured or costed—we could not measure how many tonnes of waste were diverted by, for example, an education officer leading paper-making workshops with schools—will be crucial to the future funding of such mechanisms.
Yes. We pick up the point that the Lochaber Environmental Group made in writing, about the importance of waste minimisation. The community sector has been cited by others—both today and last week—as being important in raising awareness and trying to get us to behave more sustainably. The question is how we can do that.
Meeting closed at 12:54
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