This month the Liberal Democrats put a bit more flesh on the bones of their proposed Zero Waste Bill, trailed in their pre-manifesto document A Stronger Economy and a Fairer Society unveiled before the 2014 party conference (see letsrecycle.com story).
The Bill will contain a 70% recycling target for England, along with a tougher stance on waste crime. The pre-manifesto document also promised a review of resource use, and a review of waste management tax structures in order to cut landfilling.
Yet again, a political party has concentrated its policy-making firepower on the back-end of the economy: in other words, on the waste management sector. The thinking goes that by squeezing landfilling and introducing high recycling targets, markets in which waste can be put to beneficial use will automatically emerge.
If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that markets for secondary materials have to be made – the right price signals and the right policy drivers are needed to create demand for recyclates. Even with our current levels of recycling, the supply of recyclates into the UK market is about twice what our domestic economy can absorb, with the rest exported.
Procurement
To be fair, the pre-manifesto document does refer to a demand-led policy driver – encouraging green public procurement – alongside setting legally binding targets for reducing resource consumption and improving resource efficiency. But the opportunity to integrate measures like these together with recycling targets and the like into a coherent Resource Management Bill appears to have been missed. Even the phrase “Zero Waste Bill” has a vaguely retro feel, harking back to a time when the concept of the circular economy was but a gleam in the policy-maker’s eye, and resource management in its broadest sense played a very distant second fiddle to conventional end-of-pipe waste management.
There is still time for the political parties to take a more inclusive view of resource management in their manifestos than just concentrating on our bit of the circular economy. But thus far the signs are not hopeful.
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