Jonathan Straight, chief executive of waste and recycling solutions manufacturer Straight plc, gives his thoughts on the governments 250m fund allocations for weekly waste collections.
At Straight, I think overall our reaction to the department for communities and local government (DCLG)s funding awards is very mixed. We remain unconvinced as to the obsession with weekly collection over all other criteria, but we are of course pleased that there are now developments progressing and that the funding has finally been awarded.
However, it is very hard to tell at the moment what the impact of this funding will be as very little detail has been released. DCLG has said that to give more information would have an adverse effect on competition between prospective companies and potentially put local authorities in a disadvantageous position. We don’t understand what this means, nor how the situation will be any different if the information is released at a later date.
Funding awards
This is the first direct funding for recycling on such a scale for at least a decade and it is very welcome. It is particularly welcome that the process has now been concluded, albeit several weeks later than anticipated. Much of the industry has been in a state of paralysis with councils waiting to see if they were getting funding before placing orders. The Resource Association and others have previously complained to DCLG about this.
The entire thrust of the initiative has been to encourage weekly collections, but the impression we have is that all of the recycling elements were added in as an afterthought, possibly through pressure from Defra. The basic principle is weekly collection and everything else falls into place after this. So, if a scheme was demonstrably better with less frequent collections it would be unlikely to get any assistance from this fund.
The government makes a number of claims backed by MORI and others to support its position. Much of the industry including the CIWM, the ESA and the Resource Association claim high levels of satisfaction with alternate weekly collections as well as improved recycling rates and lower costs. The issue polarises opinion but at best we don’t really know. It does seem strange to build such an expensive initiative on shaky ground. We remain very puzzled by why DCLG has taken this line and indeed why DCLG has been involved in this issue at all.
The bidding process
The government was pretty clear about which bids for funding would be accepted and which would not. So is the tail wagging the dog here? Are the successful bids shaped by what would succeed rather than by what is best for each area to achieve its best potential?
If examined on a per-household basis, the range of the grants is enormous from just 36p per-household in Blackburn with Darwen to a staggering 246.50 in Spelthorne. Some of the awards are very large indeed and one wonders how such amounts will be deployed. In the absence of any detail at this stage it is not possible to comment further. However, one wonders how apparently the same scheme can cost nine or ten times as much from one place to another.
As, we believe,the market leading supplier of food waste containers in the UK, naturally we are delighted to see food waste collection feature as a key element of this programme. Indeed, 20% of successful bids involve food waste, although it is disappointing that the number of households who will get food waste collections appears relatively small. DCLG has disclosed that 28% of the bids overall were for a weekly food waste collection, yet a weekly food waste collection only scored half the points of a weekly collection of recyclables and residual waste. It looks as though the odds were stacked against food waste collections from the start.
Incentive schemes
DCLG made it clear that it wanted to see incentive schemes as part of this process and indeed this was a key strand of the Waste Review. It should come as no surprise that almost half of the successful bids involve such a scheme (possibly the tail wagging the dog again?). The justification, according to DCLG, is to allow families to go green without facing punitive fines and taxes. While I don’t agree with the position the government has taken, the reason given is complete nonsense. Since when did going green expose anyone to fines and taxes? My own view is that rewarding people for what they should be doing anyway is not a clever stance to take.
Projected environmental improvements
The claim is that all of the new initiatives will lead to 408,547 tonnes of material being recycled. Then we are told 187,002 tonnes will be diverted from landfill. There is a large gap between these numbers which needs to be explained. If these are figures over a five year period, I calculate the improvement in the recycling rate to be a fraction of one per cent per year. Given we have to get to 50% by 2020, the impact of this entire quarter of a billion might be only two or three per cent over the period. If we look at the projected CO2 saving 1,193,168 tonnes in aggregate the cost is more than 209 per tonne. We recently bought some CO2 offsets at 7 per tonne. On the face of it this does look like a very expensive way to cut emissions.
Overall, there will undoubtedly be a benefit for the waste and recycling container industry from these awards. At this stage we cannot predict exactly what this impact will be, but we were hoping for more emphasis on food waste. The clear winners are the incentive scheme providers. How much variation there will be in the market remains to be seen. Whether this will help local businesses is also uncertain, as we know how much of a fan Mr Pickles is of the RecycleBank programme. Now do they pay UK taxes I wonder?
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