The International Solid Waste Association’s Annual Congress was held in the City of Antwerp in early September 2015. Thanks to the strange portfolio of responsibilities of the Antwerp vice-mayor Philip Heylen, which includes both waste management and cultural facilities, we had both a hugely entertaining and interesting Congress. The opening and closing ceremonies were among the best I have experienced in my years of attending ISWA Congresses.
The Congress programme as usual was packed with memorable presentations on a wide variety of topics. There was criticism of the programme in that too many of the parallel sessions were programmed on the same broad thematic streams but scheduled at the same time.
The opening plenary session started with the presentation of the Global Waste Management Outlook (GWMO) which was produced by UNEP but with support from ISWA members, particularly Professor David Wilson, who introduced the main findings and conclusions. The starting point is the fact that proper waste management would cost less than all the dis-benefits of the current position in terms of health impacts and environmental deterioration. Half of the UN’s newly agreed Sustainable Development Goals have a waste and resource management perspective within them. (The full report can be accessed at http://www.unep.org/ietc/OurWork/WasteManagement/GWMO)
Producer Responsibility
One of the main mechanisms that is utilised in the EU is producer responsibility and there were two of the concurrent sessions devoted to that issue. Clearly there is a link to the circular economy issue because producers have such an important role regarding the amount of re-use, recycling and recovery that can be undertaken with their end of life products and an even greater one in promoting the circular economy. Mathieu Hestin was the first speaker reporting on a study that Deloitte had undertaken for the EU Commission in 2013 focusing on clearance houses and procedures adopted by EU MSs. There are in excess of 200 compliance schemes operating in the EU 28 with a varying amount of responsibility that each of them take on for their obligated producers, mainly financial and/or organisational responsibility.
In discussion Mathieu Hestin was uncertain whether the UK Environment Agencies acted as a clearing house but he decided that probably that they did act in that role with the National Packaging Waste Database system, funded by compliance schemes but operated under the auspices of the UK’s Environment Agencies fulfilled most of the requirements for a clearing house. In Mathieu Hestin’s view the main roles of a clearing house are providing transparency and surveillance but it also provides clear guidelines, undertakes and checks audits of producers and an enforcement function.
Taking a more global perspective, Peter Borkey of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in his presentation focusing on governance and competitiveness noted that the OECD is currently updating its 2001 guidance on EPR. He stated that there were in excess of 400 EPR schemes worldwide with a steep increase over the past decade. Not all were industry run and he cited the Chinese EEE system, and also the Hungarian Government which five years ago nationalised its EPR schemes. The OECD study is to be published in November 2015. Initial findings on the governance issue had found a great diversity of goals and national operating environments but with four main operating models for EPR schemes: single, multiple, tradable permit (as in the UK) and government run.
With respect to competition it was difficult to disentangle whether single or competitive EPR schemes functioned better. This was because, even with single schemes, much of the most costly components, collection and sorting, are generally subject to competitive tendering, especially as the schemes mature.
‘House clearing’
There then followed a series of case studies of different types of clearing house operation, including Germany and Austria, which although having common systems with both countries starting with a single national EPR system for packaging products were now quite different in their clearing house structures. For more than a decade Germany has had competing systems for packaging recycling and established a private company to ensure that responsibilities are fairly allocated between the competing schemes. There were several problems with this approach, especially the need for complete consensus among the schemes in order to agree anything and therefore very long meetings. However, the operation of the clearing house function was basically sub-contracted to a legal firm there were no staff directly employed and clearing house costs were kept to a minimum.
Christoph Scharff, the chief executive of ARA, noted that in Austria his company had gone from being the only packaging compliance scheme to a position where a smooth transition to competition had been managed. In 1997 there was competition for C&I packaging but at the beginning of 2015 free completion for household packaging was introduced. The clearing house function is run through a Packaging Co-ordination Office within the Ministry of Environment with functions that include: auditing of all obligated companies, harmonisation of communications, allocation of market share for recycling obligations and harmonisation of waste prevention strategies.
As for the key question as to how much different schemes cost the consumer, in Germany the cost per household had been reduced from €100 per household in the 1990s to under half that now, while for the past decade in Austria it has hovered around €38. The Belgian single scheme Fost Plus costs only €15-20 per household. In all cases these schemes exceed the EU targets for recovery and recycling. All schemes noted the problem of free riding by companies that should be obligated, at a level far higher than that experienced in the UK.
The second session on EPR focussed specifically on packaging with two presentations dealing with different aspects of the Belgium’s packaging: Fost Plus initiatives to capture out of home packaging and VAL-I-PAC’s methods to encourage more recovery from smaller generators of C&I packaging. Greet Hofman from Fost Plus demonstrated how the compliance scheme goes about securing more packaging waste from out of home facilities, particularly because an increasing proportion of drinks and meals are being consumed away from people’s homes. The primary objective is to inculcate sorting habits into everyone who consumes these items so that this comes as naturally as sorting packaging waste at home.
Greet Hofman focused on sports facilities, noted that each facility needs to be examined closely for opportunities for containers to be located with a pilot scheme being started initially, suitable communication being developed and training given to all appropriate people within the facility.
Francis Huysman, speaking on behalf of VAL-I-PAC noted that there were small quantities of C&I packaging waste potentially available in a large number of sites. Builders have been encouraged to use reverse logistics to collect plastic film from sites by purchasing special plastic bags to be used for their used film packaging and to return these bags through their building materials suppliers. In its first year the new scheme yielded an extra 2,000 tonnes of waste plastic film.
The other VAL-I-PAC initiative attempted to influence a wider spectrum of industry who have been disposing of plastic film in mixed waste. Because many companies already separate their paper and board packaging so the plan was to piggyback on the collection system for the collection of that board waste from these industrial premises. VAL-I-PAC therefore started a communication campaign to alert potential users of this system and provided an inducement of 5 free bags to those companies signing up. Thereafter they have to pay for the bags which are delivered by their board collection company. In response to a question about VAL-I-PAC’s promotion of packaging re-use items in order to promote waste prevention Francis Huysman stated that although VAL-I-PAC monitored the flows of re-usable packaging no company had any obligation on these items.
Local Recycling Lessons
One of the sessions on waste prevention and recycling focussed mainly on examples of new practice in Flanders and its next door neighbour, the Netherlands. Jo Buekens, the chief executive of the Inovim Group spoke about Big Data in Waste Collection. In his presentation he provided some statistical analysis and conclusions from Flanders. The use of RFID chips in household waste bins is common throughout Flanders, therefore there is a huge amount of data that can be assessed. Households often have the choice of different capacity bins for their residual waste, including now with a minority of municipalities offering a 40 litre residual bin, but in response to a question he noted that some municipalities in the Netherlands only provide households with a 40 litre residual waste bin. He noted that even if there was a weekly collection people on average only put their waste out for collection 14 times a year.
Demographically the largest residual waste generators were in the 25-34 age group, probably associated with the use of disposable nappies. Intriguingly 4% of households never put out any residual waste for collection and while half of that can be explained by vacancy rates, people with shops using their commercial collections and other factors the other half in some municipalities might not pay anything for waste services, although most municipalities make some charge for administration and other services, irrespective of usage. Throughout Flanders, also, the household waste recycling centres charge either on a volume or weight basis for residual waste delivered.
Jo Buekens’ main conclusions were that the polluter pays principle encourages separation of the household waste and the ideal system to reduce the generation of residual waste was a combination of payment on a frequency of collection and weight of residuals waste system.
Geert Boonzaaijer, Senior Project Manager, spoke about the Reverse Waste Collection System for Arnhem. The town council wants to achieve its own target of 60% recycling by 2020 but there is a national Netherlands target of 75% recycling for 2030. Therefore starting with a pilot scheme for 8,000 households (77,000 in Arnhem) in three contrasting areas, by housing type and demographics, Arnhem has gone for a reverse waste management system whereby people have their recyclable waste collected but now need to use newly installed underground containers, which might be up to 150 metres from their home for their residual waste.
The 80 underground containers cost an average of €4,500 for purchase and installation, lower than estimated. The town employed 6 formerly unemployed people for the first 6 months to work as waste coaches to provide on the ground assistance for people and these new temporary workers were also given training to help them to permanent jobs.
Based on the dramatic results of the pilot in promoting greater separation Arnhem has now taken the decision to introduce the system throughout the town over the next three years, with provision for those unable to access the underground refuse containers. The financial cost equation also looks convincing. Therefore Arnhem has decided to retain its current method for households to pay for their waste services through local taxation which is parallel to the UK, including the discount for single person households.
Postscript
In order to find out the real situation regarding waste management in Antwerp I asked the taxi driver on our return to the station for his views. Antwerp has a bag-based system with white bags for residual waste, blue bags for light packaging products and originally green bags for organic waste. The problem with the green bags was that people found it difficult to put their kitchen waste in them and store it for up to a week and for Antwerp this was soon abandoned. As for the light fraction there were difficulties for people in determining what materials were acceptable, especially the types of plastics. Therefore, if inappropriate items were in the bag people faced the threat of withdrawal of the service after warnings have been given. The suspicion was that Antwerp wanted to maximise its sales of its expensive residual waste bags.
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