Fiddling while carbon burns

Ian Wakelin explains why we need to make decisions about waste quickly and effectively 

The Audit Commission recently warned local authorities that delaying current waste treatment plans may mean England misses its 2013 landfill target by 13 per cent. That could cost £140 million in penalties. Given that at the time of writing, over 120 councils may not recover about £1 billion they'd invested with Icelandic banks, those penalties are naturally worrying.

Ian Wakelin is the chief executive officer of Greenstar UK. Originally a chartered accountant, he founded Materials Recovery Ltd in 2001. This merged with Irish company NTR in 2003 to become Greenstar and the business focuses on recycling-led waste management.

Those delays may affect plans for facilities to convert waste into energy or fuel. NIMBY-ism is fuelling the delay, even abandonment, of schemes that would reduce waste going to landfill by using it productively.

We all know that smarter technologies and plant design can process more dry recyclables to higher quality and therefore reuse. We can collect and process organics, as well as unrecoverable and unusable materials, to produce energy and fuels. Together, these can help shrink Britain's carbon footprint – but only if they're allowed to happen.

Greenstar is investing in new infrastructure because resource recovery is good business and good sense. We've built one of the UK's largest MRFs near Birmingham and will be building one similar in London. Both feature technology producing quality recyclates.

Committment 

What we and others desire is parallel commitment from government when it comes to the necessary permissions and approvals while, of course, safeguarding health, safety and environmental impacts. What we can't do, as an industry, society or nation, is to delay projects while every shade of opinion is considered. The solutions are there. Tough choices need to be made, and quickly.

Our collective goal must be reducing the use of packaging, expanding recycling domestically and commercially, diverting more organic waste, and creating more capacity for both recyclate processing and EfW, be that either traditional technology or those emerging technologies which may come to the fore over time. No wonder Defra said recently that food waste collection for use in AD facilities can help Britain meet its renewable energy targets.

To boost recycling, collection must be as simple and easy as possible. That's why I back co-mingled collections – though not exclusively. Co-mingling's success in boosting both domestic and commercial recycling rates delivers many thousands more tonnes to our MRFs, which translates into carbon savings. I estimate that in the last year, Greenstar's MRFs have helped cut nearly 145,000 tonnes in CO2 emissions – and when we're operating at our full license capacity, we could be cutting nearly 580,000 tonnes of CO2 annually.

We shouldn't allow any further delays if vital infrastructure is to help slow the minute hand on the global warming clock. Because if we don't, then we will all be as blinkered as Nero was, fiddling while his world went up in flames.