Councils which slash their budgets in areas such as waste prevention and communications risk paying more later, according to a former WRAP analyst.
Julian Parfitt, research and technical director for consultancy Resource Futures, told the annual Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee (LARAC) conference on Thursday (November 4) that the two areas were often seen as “easy” targets for spending cuts.
However, he stressed that the UK was still only mid-table in Europe when it came to recycling performance and that it was important to keep promoting the benefits and educating householders.
Pointing to an ongoing drive in Munich, he stressed that the continent's most successful recyclers never took their feet off the gas.
He said: “There is not a point in the recycling curve when it is so firmly embedded that we don't need to help the public understand. What we don't want is to spend money on infrastructure and make it inefficient because no one can use it properly.”
On waste minimisation, Mr Parfitt said that there had not been much action in this area despite prevention being at the top of the statutory waste hierarchy in the revised Waste Framework Directive, which sets the ground rules for waste across Europe.
Subsidising bins
Using a model he himself devised for WRAP in 2009 for calculating how much waste home composting diverted from landfill, he claimed that subsidising bins saved councils money in the long term.
He said: “You can get quite large savings over time if you keep home composting bins in use. Cut the programme and you are saving money now to spend more later. There is a need to think about all these decisions more in depth to avoid some of those perverse effects.”
Instead of making cuts in these areas, Mr Parfitt suggested that councils should move to alternate weekly collection of residual waste and recycling and charge for green waste collections to save money.
Referencing a Defra study from 2010 which analysed waste data from 28 local authorities, he said that such schemes created the best recycling performance while also reducing waste arisings.
He said: “AWC & charged garden waste have important role, given need for greater service cost-effectiveness.”
Register for free to comment