“Pragmatic” and “local solutions” to disposing of waste have an important part to play in delivering local authority services according to Barry Brockbank, assistant director in operations at Stoke-on-Trent city council.
With over a decade over experience including work in the recycling and waste team at Stockport council and at Stoke-on-Trent, he is of the view that a national approach to recycling targets does not fit well to all local authority situations.
He explains: “My personal view is that I am not sure blanket recycling targets set nationally actually work anymore: not for the environment, not for the public and not financially.”
Stoke-on-Trent and Stockport
The assistant director has been working in Stoke-on-Trent’s operations team for two years after leaving Stockport, where he worked for 12 years.
The contrast between the two areas is significant. Stockport has some of the highest recycling rates in the country, achieving 10th place in the UK in 2015/17 with 59.4% and Stoke-on-Trent has a rate of 36.1%, coming in at 263.
Stoke-on-Trent is part of the Staffordshire Waste Partnership, which also includes eight borough or district councils as well as Staffordshire county council.
All the councils operate household waste and recycling collections, including free garden waste collections for at least one bin per household, and bulky waste collections. Services are delivered through a mixture of ‘in-house’ and contracted out services, reported its 2014 Joint Municipal Waste Management Strategy.
Narrow streets
In some ways the two places seem similar in terms of population sizes, geography and diversity but Mr Brockbank explained that Stoke-on-Trent faces a number of “unique challenges”, the roots of many of which were laid down centuries ago.
“We have the legacy of some of the earliest industrialisation in the country. That infrastructure arranged around narrow streets is still in place in some parts of the city and is an immutable constraint on the recycling operations we provide.
“As in the rest of the country the systems work well in the green, broad streets of our suburbs, but in other areas some residents are faced with dragging the universal wheelie bin through their homes for collection. Is this the right thing to expect people to do in the 21st Century?” said Mr Brockbank.
Costs
With relatively low prices available for recyclables and a problem of high levels of contamination, it can cost Stoke-on-Trent up to £100 per tonne to dispose of recycling, whereas it costs around £65 per tonne to incinerate, states Mr Brockbank.
Describing himself as an avid environmentalist, the officer added that in the face of the figures, he cannot even push the financial argument for recycling and “frankly I question even some of the environmental credentials of recycling”.
“We own an incinerator in the city. Sometimes our recycling vehicles drive by it, burning fuel and adding to the traffic in order to deliver at higher cost recycling materials nobody really wants.
“Yet we could have generated heat and power from the same material which we do want and need. If it weren’t for the recycling targets would we ever have countenanced such an absurdity?” said Mr Brockbank.
As part of the team that turned Stockport’s recycling rate of 11% to over 60% in five years, Mr Brockbank said: “Local authorities have on the whole done a great job in moving this country away from an unfettered bury, burn and forget culture.
“However, my question is if we had an inkling when we set off years ago that this is where we would have ended up, would we have embraced it with such enthusiasm as we did?”
Operational realities
Speaking on the government’s adoption of the 50% EU recycling target by 2020, Mr Brockbank, explained: “The world has changed, but yet we are still expected to pursue the same targets. Government policy seems intent on adhering to targets set for a different time and a different world, regardless of the economic and operational realities we all face.”
“The whole system needs a review. In Britain we break systems up and analyse them in pieces. We should look at the whole system. There is a focus on household waste collection when it’s a small part of a part of a part. Partial analysis brings partial solutions.”
The officer added that in terms of policy approaches at a national level, seems to have been abandoned, as waste is built in to the system the moment the product leaves the design board, yet the focus from the government is at the end of the pipeline.
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