One of the government's advisors in drawing up the forthcoming Waste Strategy 2006 (see letsrecycle.com story), Mr Lisney was speaking at Defra's packaging recovery conference in London yesterday.
He said there would be opportunities for joint ventures between the public and private sectors beyond the letting of municipal contracts to private waste companies.
The assistant director of environment for Hampshire county council was particularly keen to urge businesses affected by the packaging producer responsibility regulations that the time to connect with local authorities was now.
“We need to make a convergence of systems for collecting packaging,” he said. “No producer has the ability to optimise the way collections are carried out, they depend on local authorities.”
His warning focused on the Packaging Directive's 2008 recycling targets, reminding packaging producers and compliance schemes that to meet the collection demands of that year, planning had to be put in place this year.
The Directive's recovery targets are already beginning to bite for producers of packaging waste, and for the European demands of 2008 to be met substantial increases in collections from householders will be needed. The difficulty here is that local authority recycling targets are not based on packaging, and councils are more likely to prioritise biodegradable materials like paper and green waste.
Mr Lisney suggested the best way to attract the attention of local authorities to urge them to collect packaging waste was to deal with them at chief executive level, rather than dealing with recycling officers. This was because changes to services required a higher level of planning than could be achieved by waste management departments, he said.
Hampshire
Mr Lisney spoke of his own local authority – Hampshire county council – and its county waste partnership Project Integra, which is already progressing towards joining up non-municipal with municipal waste management.
The county's key principle is to treat waste as a “resource”, and to move towards the managing of “material flows” within Hampshire to take account of municipal and non-municipal wastes.
Hampshire has developed a report detailing the views of all stakeholders in the waste chain – More from Less (2005) – with the ambition of recycling 60% of all materials within the county that would otherwise have gone to disposal.
Mr Lisney said concerning the county: “The challenge now is to influence delivery of what could be 60 new facilities in a market economy.” He said Hampshire would be working with SMEs to help cater for their waste needs, and said that for larger companies too, there was a need for “synergies with business so that costs can be shared”.
For councils, Mr Lisney said officers needed to have their briefs broadened “beyond the municipal waste stream and get more involved in material flow management”.
He said for companies working at a national scale, the local government sector needed to establish negotiators to work on its behalf, probably at a regional level.
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