The Government’s industrial strategy green paper published earlier this year threw a bone to our sector with brief mention of reducing raw material demand, improving resource productivity, promoting “markets for secondary materials”, and the promise of more detail in the 25 Year Environment Plan. Fast forward six months, and this week’s white paper offers a few more crumbs by way of a commitment to “a regenerative circular economy” with the ubiquitous “butterfly” diagram but little else.
Work on the Plan is delayed while a proposed resources and waste strategy, welcome as it is, has only just got off the ground. Meanwhile the countdown to a probable hard Brexit continues, with not even an outline of what will replace the EU waste acquis after March 2019 beyond the previously trailed intention to tackle food waste and waste crime.
If there is a silver lining, it is that the mood music suggests that Defra and BEIS appear to be working closer and better together than in previous administrations. This must be good news, because the environmental and resource benefits our sector can provide can only be delivered through industrial activity and functioning markets, preferably within the UK.
Matching
Linking an industrial strategy with a resource strategy involves matching the UK’s material and energy requirements with outputs from the waste management sector, on a sectoral and spatial basis. In relation to the first case, information on sectoral material flows has never been compiled in this way.
The early mass balance work funded by the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme needs to be dusted down, refreshed, and extended to the new industrial sectors currently promoted by BEIS.
Questions
How much of which material is imported? Can these imports and domestically extracted raw materials be replaced by discard-sourced secondary materials produced by the UK waste management sector? Given the small size of the UK industrial sector to what extent would the UK need to continue accessing overseas markets to place the balance of the recovered material? What quality standards would our sector need to achieve, and how would they translate into recycling and reuse targets? What are the implications for the way in which we collect and process our waste? What types of processing technologies and infrastructure would we need and how much capital would that entail? These are some of the questions we need to answer if we are to develop a meaningful market-led resource strategy.
Clusters
The same considerations apply to energy produced by our sector, but with a twist, especially if recovered heat is to be utilised. In a low-key launch this month of the report Density-based Spatial Clustering, BEIS presents a methodology for Identifying industrial clusters in the UK. BEIS argues that “businesses in clusters benefit from agglomeration externalities such as knowledge spillovers, better access to relevant skills, and reduced costs due to supply chain integration”, and extolls the virtues of colocation.
As our sector has pointed out to BEIS, regional regeneration and SME growth would benefit from planned colocation of waste processing facilities with local businesses utilising the former’s outputs.
The main block is psychological – that is, to re-conceptualise the waste management sector as a genuine supply chain partner rather than being considered primarily as an end-of-pipe player, something that UK policymakers in the past have found particularly difficult. It is hoped that the white paper’s espousal of zero avoidable waste with the semblance of a target (a doubling of resource productivity by 2050) will prove decisive in underpinning a resource strategy that is as transformative for our sector as the industrial strategy is promised to be for the UK economy.
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