November launch for first carbon metric waste data

Data showing the carbon impact of waste treatment of municipal waste will be published for the first time alongside local authority waste management data in November.

The carbon report will provide details of the national carbon performance of recycling and waste activities in England, and may also display regional data.

However, funding requirements have lead to the development of local authority specific carbon reports being placed on hold and it is not yet known when this data will be available.

The development of the scheme was first unveiled in the Waste Review, published in June 2011 (see letsrecycle.com story) with the government claiming that it would seek to promote the use of a carbon metric to measure the impact of different treatment options for waste.

Benefit

It is hoped that the carbon metric will lead local authorities to shift their focus from waste activities that capture the most tonnage of material, to those with a greater carbon benefit.

And, while Defra revealed in March that preparatory work had begun on the system (see letsrecycle.com story), it is unclear when the data will be ready for publication.

Once completed, the carbon metric will give each council a carbon factor to the tonnages of recycling, reuse, composting and residual treatment carried out alongside other waste management data published on the governments municipal waste data reporting system WasteDataFlow.

Each local authoritys carbon factor will be based on the data submitted by councils on tonnages of recycling, reuse, composting and residual waste treatment and measured against carbon factor data taken from the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP).

Scotland

The Scottish Government has already committed to the adoption of a carbon metric system to measure the recycling performance of its local authorities, which is set to come into force from 2013 (see letsrecycle.com story).

It is hoped that the carbon metric will lead local authorities to prioritise high impact carbon materials, such as textiles and plastics which have a low level of recycling within Scotland.

The system takes into account the greenhouse gas emissions across the life cycle of a material and it is intended to complement, and not displace, the existing tonnage-based collection measures.

The impact of vehicle movements of waste are not included in developing the carbon factor, as the data is not readily available, but according to WasteDataFlow, research has shown that the carbon impacts of transportation are minimal when compared to the impacts of waste treatment technologies.