Waste prevention suffering from “recycling dominance”

The report, written by London-based environmental consultancy Brook Lyndhurst and published last week (October 13), draws on evidence from the Environment Agency, Defra, WRAP, research studies and stakeholders to assess current practices and barriers regarding waste prevention and minimisation.

And, it found that waste prevention efforts were often confused with recycling and that recycling could act as a reason for people not to perform more waste prevention activities.

This was picked up as particularly troubling due to the fact that prevention and minimisation are regarded as more desirable than recycling in the waste hierarchy.

The research, entitled Household Waste Prevention: Evidence Review, stated: “Importantly, research has suggested that waste prevention behaviours are poorly correlated with recycling, and are sometimes even negatively correlated – such that recycling may become a reason for not doing more to reduce waste.

“The research also revealed a degree of confusion among the public between ‘recycling' and ‘reduction' and the two are often conflated in the public's mindset.”

Brook Lyndhurst asserted that the problam may be due to people having become so familiar with the “dominance of recycling” that they counted is as a measure of waste reduction and current waste policy could see local authorities “inadvertently favour recycling over prevention”.

Standards

In addition to concerns about recycling, the study found that there was currently no standard set of behaviours for what counted as ‘household waste prevention' – as waste prevention was seen as being comprised of a number of “small, incremental moves”.

The study claimed that this made it harder for people to quantify when they were reducing waste compared to when they were recycling, which was seen as a more tangible effort and therefore had a greater level of public participation.

The review did explain that the most common waste prevention methods were seen as home composting, rejecting junk mail, avoiding single-use bags, reusing leftover food and switching to reusable nappies.

Other barriers to waste prevention were seen as apathy, a feeling that it was someone else's responsibility, inconvenience, cost, a weak self capacity for beneficial change and social norms pushing mass consumption. Although this gave the “basics” of barriers, the study claimed that there were a wide variety of reasons reported in the evidence used.

Reuse

The reuse and third sector was seen as an area of “optimism” for waste prevention by stakeholders, with revisions to the WEEE Directive seen as potentially increasing reuse activity.

It claimed that there were currently 500,000 tonnes of bulky waste (including WEEE) and textiles being reused, and with the correct use of best practice approaches said that that this could double and see between a quarter and a third of bulky waste reused.

The research also found that reuse initiatives such as car boot sales, online auction site eBay and community reuse network Freecycle could also prove beneficial in boosting the reuse of items, although it didn't include figures on their current diversion rates.