Defra waste chief defends C&I survey findings

Speaking at the Redefining Commercial Waste conference in Central London, Roy Hathaway offered a breakdown of the key themes and findings of the Survey of Commercial and Industrial (C&I) Waste Arisings 2010, the first to be carried out by the department since 2002/3.

The research, which was published in its final form in December 2010, indicated a 29% fall in waste landfilled between 2002 and 2009 (see letsrecycle.com story).

The survey is intended to help form the basis for Defra policy on commercial and industrial waste and has been incorporated into the ongoing review of waste policy, which is set to have its findings published in May 2011.

However, at this weeks event, Mr Hathaway was subjected to a volley of questions and queries over the usefulness of the data.

The main concerns raised were over the marked decline in waste to landfill between the two surveys, whether the sample size was representative of the commercial and industrial waste sector and how the data would be used to formulate government policy.

Matthew Farrow, director of policy at the Environmental Services Association, questioned whether the timing of the survey would impact its overall value. He said: It is great to have new data but it is partly undermined by the fact it was collected in the deepest recession in 60 years or so.

It raises all sorts of questions about the impact of the recession and whether [these figures] were part of some wider trend, he added. Furthermore, Mr Farrow said that the data was devalued a little by the timing of the study.

Concerns over the impact of the recession on the value of the figures has been voiced before, with industry experts mindful of creating a distorted picture of the sector if 2009/10 was used as a benchmark (see letsrecycle.com story).

Mr Hathaway said that Defra had never expected that the survey would show a 29% reduction in waste to landfill in the sector and acknowledged that it was a very big figure but he was confident in its accuracy.

Provisional

Peter Selkirk, chief executive of container manufacturer Egbert Taylor, questioned whether the information was authentic given that a provisional report of the findings, published in October 2010 (see letsrecycle.com story), had shown that waste-to-landfill had fallen just 3% between 2002/03 and 2010.

A lot of us in the industry find that [rise from 3% to 29%] hard to believe, said Mr Selkirk. It would make Britain the most successful country in terms of waste reduction in the world.

In response, Mr Hathaway pointed to the impact of the economic downturn on the difference in the figures for landfilled waste between the 2002/03 and 2010 surveys. He also added that greater statistical analysis had gone into the full publication than the provisional one.

He said: We were very perturbed that having published some provisional figures in October that when the statisticians came to study them line-by-line they then had to publish in December with something that was much weightier than in October.

Sample

Elsewhere, Phil Conran of 360 Environmental questioned whether the sample sizes used in the survey were representative of the C&I sector across the UK.

Mr Hathaway revealed that information had been drawn from 1,200 businesses in London, 2,000 in the South West and 1,000 in the North West although the North West data was gathered for a separate survey and incorporated into the Defra data. The data for the remaining regions was drawn from between 270 and 640 businesses per region.

Bob Gordon, environment policy advisor at the British Retail Consortium, said, from his personal experience of market data collection, any sample of over 1,000 was acceptable and praised the number of respondents in the Defra survey.