The London Waste and Recycling Board (LWaRB) should provide some well needed infrastructure to deal with “waste” as a “resource”, but what about encouraging innovation as well?
James MacDonald is project manager on the resource enterprise team at the London Community Recycling Network (LCRN). The organisation promotes, supports and represents the community recycling sector in London The energy-intensive process of virgin material extraction, manufacture and transport to the UK for sale – referred to as the embodied energy of a product – demonstrates how much additional impact waste materials have.
Under the current paradigm – in the name of economic efficiency – most of these “waste” materials, once used or to save on redistribution costs, are dumped into big holes in the ground. And yet they could far better represent a raw material for recycling and remanufacture or finished goods for reuse.
The waste hierarchy properly respects this relationship, minimising the loss of embodied energy by reducing the need for virgin material extraction. Reduction, reuse and recycling lessens environmental degradation and energy use, and thus carbon emissions.
Third Sector waste management enterprises have pioneered reuse and kerbside recycling collections over the last two decades and continue to innovate, using the waste hierarchy to guide their work.
The LWaRB Fund of £84 million could go a long way to finance and implement these types of innovation on the ground in London through supporting the community resource sector. Social enterprises are renowned for delivering real social and environmental benefits, because their profits are reinvested back into the business to deliver these services, instead of being distributed to financially-motivated shareholders.
In this way the community sector can deliver real “green jobs”, training opportunities for local people and benefit for low-income families, who can access furniture, white goods and other resources for a fraction of the price of high-street retailers.
The sector is not just about doing good; it is an innovation leader. Take ethical fashion: instead of sending textiles to be incinerated, landfilled or exported overseas, East London fashion houses like amoosi and goodone remanufacture waste textiles into cutting-edge, boutique fashion garments.
While there is a lot of support for building high-tech incineration plants to generate energy – which unfortunately cause carcinogenic pollution, like dioxins, and ecotoxins in the bottom ash – the community sector has instead promoted a closed-loop, more environmentally sensitive solution through anaerobic digestion, which captures natural gas from food waste to generate energy and produce a compost by-product, and which is then used to grow food, some becoming food waste and so on.
The sector has also embraced Web 2.0 and is looking towards Web 3.0: Freecycle was one of the first initiatives to break new ground, changing the way people approached their old possessions. Instead of treating these as waste they became a resource, with people exchanging, getting and giving away free stuff they did or didn't need.
Now these tools are about to get even better, with portals coming on tap which help people decide the best way to dispose of materials locally, and exchange large batches of goods. However all this is just the tip of the iceberg.
As we wait for the results from the London Waste and Recycling Board on the 5th May, the community resource sector is gearing-up to start implementing on-the-ground waste infrastructure, to make London greener, leaner in the recession and a more exciting place to live.
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