Paper recyclers have raised concerns that efforts by the government to encourage and subsidise the production of energy from waste may damage recycling rates.
The comments came from David Workman, director-general of the Confederation of Paper Industries, who was speaking at meeting of the Associate Parliamentary Sustainable Resource Group (APSRG) in London yesterday (December 7).
How do you make sure to maintain a high recycling level while there is lots of pressure and subsidies to move down a different route?
David Workman, CPI
At the event, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, a spokesman for DECC, provided an update on how the government is planning to incentivise the production of energy from waste (EfW).
He explained that EfW was important if the UK was to meet its legally-binding European target to produce 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 and that a number of policies are being put in place to encourage the private sector to invest in facilities.
This includes: electricity market reform; a planning assumption in favour of sustainable development; and, financial support mechanisms such as the Renewables Obligation, Feed-in Tariffs and the forthcoming Renewable Heat Incentive. He explained further details would be published before the end of the year.
Enabling councils to retain local business rates was also a measure by which plants would be incentivised, he said.
Concern
Commening on this, Mr Workman said many CPI members had built energy-from-waste facilities with CHP.
However, he raised concerns that the government's policies to incentivise it could encourage potentially recyclable waste to be used for energy instead.
In particular, he pointed to lower-quality material which was collected commingled and sorted in materials recycling facilities. He said this was an issues for various materials, not just paper.
He said: “We all have very serious concerns at the moment about the quality of materials coming back into closed loop systems. How do you make sure to maintain a high recycling level while there is lots of pressure and subsidies to move down a different route?”
On this topic, he said it was important to ensure that materials collected commingled did not make up the feedstock.
However, he said it was crucial to ensure that energy-from-waste plants had a guaranteed feedstock. This, he pointed out, was one of the key areas being looked at as part of the government's ongoing waste review.
He said: “I think we have to ensure that…commingling is not the feedstock and the full value of resources are separated out and used for beneficial effect. But we should be under no illusion – these [EfW] projects require some security of supply which investors are going to be looking for.”
FoE
Responding to these comments, Julian Kirby, resource use campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said that security of supply was just as important for the recycling sector.
He said: “You mention security of supply. Reprocessors are crying out for security of supply and they are not getting it from this country while much of our recyclate is sent abroad for recycling, and that's largely due to commingling”.
Paul Levett, deputy chief executive of Veolia Environmental Services, said that he would not be happy with his managers if they were burning waste which could be recycled because it was “much more profitable to recycle”.
On commingling, he added that Veolia had found that residents tended to recycle more when they could conveniently put all their recyclables in one container.
However, Mr Kirby claimed that when MRF reject rates were factored in, commingled recycling did not produce greater recycling rates.
He added that it was important to stress that separating materials at the kerbside did not necessarily mean that householders had to have lots of boxes and that often they put all materials into the one box.
He said: “We need to get over the misunderstanding that either we have lots of bins or we have commingling.”
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