The waste management sector has responded saying that the CRN approach fails to tackle the waste stream as a whole. It has also emerged that many CRN schemes fail to collect plastics from the municipal waste stream – the CRN currently provides recycling services to 1.5 million households.
The comments from CRN come in response to concerns expressed by the waste management companies to letsrecycle.com, see concerns. Andy Moore, CRN coordinator, described the views of the waste management industry as “uninformed rubbish”, adding: “Waste paper can be collected at the kerbside in quantities which will meet local authority targets. Indeed, the community sector has been collecting significant percentages for local authorities for years.”
Extinction
Mr Moore said: “The trend in kerbside collections as practised by CRN members is taking the UK away from large MRFs as a solution. The dinosaur-sized MRFs which take mixed domestic recyclables are currently heading for extinction. Many large MRFs end up consigning large percentages of perfectly recyclable material to landfill. This is due largely to the poor quality of input material and unrealistic expectations about how such material can be sorted mechanically or by hand at speed.
“Community sector MRFs, dealing with specific parts of the waste stream sorted by the householder, achieve average reject rates of 4% of input material.”
And, Mr Moore claimed that quality demands for material have always been likely to be the downfall of the big MRF. Referring to a draft guide produced by the Paper Federation, he said the guide “leaves those involved in paper recovery and recycling in doubt as to the quality required and the experience of the consumers of various grades of incoming feedstock by origin and handling. Draft proposals say that the kerbside collection of paper mixed with other dry recyclables and then sorted at a clean MRF is an ‘unacceptable practice’ that has to be phased out. The CRN agrees and applauds this move by the recovered paper industry.”
People
The chair of CRN, Andy Cunningham of Avon Friends of the Earth, said that by sorting at the kerbside “a lot less work is done elsewhere which avoids the inevitable sorting costs down the line.” And, he said that waste management and recycling solutions are not just technical – “they are people solutions. We have got to engage the public to some extent we are exploiting free labour, we are getting good participation in schemes.”
Continued on page 2
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