Defra cool on incentives for recyclate use

A Defra official has scotched hopes that the government will incentivise manufacturers to use recycled materials in their products, stating that demand for material should develop through commercial markets.

The comments came from Dr Colin Church, director for resource and waste at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), who was addressing delegates at the inaugural conference of the Resource Association, the UKs reprocessing sector trade body, in London today (July 9).

In his presentation, Dr Church said that the government would step back where businesses are better placed to act and would intervene where only government can adding that public funding constraints limited areas in which the government could take action.

He said: We are very much in a space where we have to be careful to focus on what central government can do. There are things in the past that we have been involved in because we thought we could contribute in areas that are not necessarily core government business, but we have a reducing amount of money and we must focus on areas we are required to.

Dr Church added that core activity included support for high quality recycling through measures such as the proposed MRF Code of Practice, which is intended to improve the quality of the material produced by materials recycling facilities (MRFs), and which it is hoped will encourage economic growth in the reprocessing sector.

Manufacture

But, responding to a question from Duncan Oakes, commercial director of Lincolnshire based plastics recycler ECO Plastics on enforcing a mandatory requirement for manufacturers to use recycled content in their products, Dr Church said that the government would not be keen to create a market through regulation.

He said: If you are looking at things through the lens that government should be doing what only government can do, you have to ask if that is the best way to go forward. My question would be: why is government intervention needed for that to happen? If the market develops itself then it is much more likely to work than if it is created through regulation.

And, turning to municipal waste policy, he said that there were currently no plans for the government to consider a pay as you throw policy, where residents are charged according to the amount of residual waste that they throw away.

You may want that, but not everyone else does, he told delegates, adding: There is currently no intention in government to revisit that.

Waste management

Earlier in the session, the conference heard from David Palmer-Jones, chief executive of waste management firm SITA UK, and chairman of the Environmental Services Association (ESA), the trade body representing waste management firms in the UK.

Mr Palmer-Jones called for the waste management and material reprocessing sectors to work together to address concerns over recyclate quality, and added that the two sectors needed to grow in a mutually beneficial way to respond to the needs of end users of material.

He said: There is a tendency in the market to blame everyone else for the quality of material. We are in the infancy of our market and these growing pains will improve if we work together each part of the industry needs to accept that.

Local government can help, but reprocessors also need to recognise that quality costs and that cost needs to be borne equally across the supply chain.

Quality

Also commenting on material quality, Craig Robinson, head of paper sourcing at paper manufacturer UPM, added that MRF operators needed to enforce a stricter line on the quality of input that goes into facilities, including challenging clients that produce poor quality material.

He said: A lot of the risk is pushed toward MRF operators by local authorities. We should not be accepting it as an industry because ultimately the efficiency of my plant allows me to give local authorities more value back to them in terms of what they provide.

We need to be enforcing input quality criteria, MRFs are often reluctant to do so but we need to be brave in this area.