And, the organisation, which includes ECT Recycling, Novelis and the Textile Recycling Association among its supporters, has called for an emphasis on collecting high quality materials to combat the worst effects of the economic slowdown on the recycling sector.
Andy Moore, the Campaign for Real Recycling's (CRR) coordinator, warned of the effect on the recycling sector as a whole if low quality materials could not be exported and were instead landfilled in the UK.
“It will be interesting to see what happens to the low quality material currently resulting from single-stream, compacted collections,” he said. “The media have been constantly looking for stories of collected recyclables being landfilled.”
“If they start to find such instances as a result of lost export markets, all recycling, quality oriented or not, could be tarred with the same brush. Both business and the environment will be the losers,” he added.
The warning came after Mr Moore echoed comments made by the head of Defra's waste division, Roy Hathaway last week that low quality materials could be “squeezed out” by the downturn (see letsrecycle.com story).
Mr Moore explained: “We are pleased to note that Defra recognises that material quality is key. Markets for low quality material are indeed now going to be squeezed as export markets collapse.
“But this effect was widely predicted and we will always be subject to such market whims unless we aim at greater self-reliance in the UK,” he added.
Demand
In the last two weeks, the UK recovered paper (see letsrecycle.com story), metals and plastics (see letsrecycle.com story) markets have all been hit by a fall in demand from overseas, including the key market of China.
Speaking to letsrecycle.com today, Mr Moore acknowledged that the problems with export markets had affected all materials no matter how they were collected, but claimed that “there is certainly more security in quality”.
Mr Moore called for an emphasis on quality to boost the UK market and make it less reliant on exporting materials for reprocessing.
“To create more resilience for the future we now need an incentive to invest in collection systems that prioritise quality in order to feed an expansion in UK reprocessing,” he said.
“To begin with this means transparency of material journey and destination, especially for material through MRFs. Defra needs to do more than just call for more interest in a voluntary scheme: it needs to require transparency in future,” he added.
His comments come after Mr Hathaway bemoaned the slow sign-up among MRFs to the ESA audit for the quality of materials being sorted at facilities, the Recycling Registration Service.
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