Following severe criticism from MPs, local authorities and industry as well as criticism in the national press, Environment Minister Michael Meacher held a crisis meeting last week in a bid to resolve the problems.
The meeting was attended by government officials, the Local Government Association, retailers, community groups and metals recyclers. One recycler who attended the meeting told letsrecycle.com: “Michael Meacher is totally committed to making this work.”
The meeting heard that DEFRA has now indicated that it wants retailers to re-start their take-back schemes and a protocol for restoring take back collections is currently being considered under a fast-track consultation procedure.
Two proposals have been put forward which would enable retailers to re-start their take-back schemes. But to do this, the government would have to change the controlled waste regulations so that waste that re-designated as household waste.
Re-starting the retailer scheme would reduce the number of fridges that need to be disposed of and so mean that the government would have to pay local authorities less money for their storage and disposal. This is because community recyclers take about 15% of the fridges from the retailers for refurbishing. Costs would also be reduced because the fridges would be in a small number of central points instead of being located at a large number of different civic amenity sites.
The government has also proposed that a recycling credit, which would cover the transport costs of taking the fridges from the retailers' delivery point to a designated storage or disposal site, be introduced. The credit is needed to ensure that contractors pick up the fridges from the retailers because retailers only have a limited storage space. The recycling credit is likely to be around 15.
Although recyclers would have more paperwork to complete because they would have to prove that the fridges they refurbished were from households and not commercial organisations, this would be a vast improvement on the current situation.
One industry observer said that he thought it was likely that something would be agreed shortly which would be acceptable to both councils and retailers.
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