For years we in the UK have been making waste policy on a piecemeal basis, and nothing illustrates this better than our approach to landfill diversion of biowaste. The waste hierarchy has formed the cornerstone of our strategic thinking ever since the first “serious” strategy document, “Making Waste Work” was published in 1996.
Recycling and waste expert, Gev Eduljee, is director of external affairs at SITA UK Yet, although “Resource Productivity: Making More with Less” (2001) re-emphasised that “[waste should be tackled] in the context of resource productivity”, we have doggedly given precedence in policy terms to 25 million tonnes of municipal waste over 75 million tonnes of commercial-industrial (C&I) waste, even though, in the words of the Waste Framework Directive, the two streams were “similar … because of [their] nature or composition”. Thus, for every tonne of biodegradable municipal waste we diverted from landfill, we re-introduced a tonne from the C&I waste stream, negating efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions from our landfills.
The past months has seen politicians and policy-makers talk tough on landfill. In England Hilary Benn has called for an end to the landfilling of food waste and aluminium, while the Scottish Administration has in mind a longer hit list of materials it might consider banning from landfills. Whether consciously or otherwise, this policy instrument for the first time begins to address material streams across the spectrum of waste generators, on a consistent basis.
It is not hard to see the attraction that a landfill ban might have to policy-makers keen to move materials out of landfill and into productive use, either as recycled products or as recovered energy. While the UK has favoured economic instruments such as trading schemes, the efficiency in delivering an environmental outcome must be considered in relation to its urgency.
Trading schemes may well delivery outcomes at lower overall cost, but their signals to waste producers and to the waste industry are far more ambiguous than with more direct regulatory interventions, and their outcomes tend to be delivered over a longer period.
LATS is in reality bounded by diversion targets with strict time deadlines and penalties. Remove these and LATS as a pure, stand-alone economic instrument will be far less effective in diverting waste from landfill. In general, the waste management sector favours regulatory certainty in order to be able to plan for capital investments in infrastructure. Pure market-based instruments tend not to provide the same degree of certainty.
Having said that, the UK needs to tread with care in the case of a biowaste landfill ban, because it will unravel established structures. Local authority biowaste strategies, MBT plant design and LATS are all geared towards partial treatment of biowaste. An absolute landfill ban or the imposition of a de minimis level of biological activity will have a seismic impact on the UK waste management scene, since MBT plants will have to be reconfigured to treat more intensively, and LATS/LAS will effectively be redundant.
Nor do we have alternative facilities to take this waste to. Landfill bans have to go hand-in-hand with the delivery of treatment and recovery infrastructure, straining our already lumbering strategic planning system. And not least, we need markets for the products we create.
It remains to be seen what WRAP's ongoing project on landfill bans will propose.
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