Speaking on day 1 (11 October) of the LARAC Conference last week, Mr Mills discussed the impacts that upcoming policy will have on small businesses and local authorities and how the resources charity is helping.
He explained that due “cost increases” small businesses will find it hard to get on board with a number policies set out in the strategy, including separate food waste collections and any requirements under the imminent Simpler Recycling plans.
Mr Mills explained: “These policies are touching 2.3million businesses that have never really had any of these sort of regulations in this place. So, how we engage and support them to avoid them being overburdened in a tough economic climate is important.
“In the Defra impact assessment, you can clearly see that small and micro-sized businesses, even if they incorporate food waste and extra packaging, probably will see quite a big cost increase unless they optimise their services. It’s going to be a tough sell in this sort of day and age, particularly if we want to recover that packaging from them for producers, and we want to get the food waste out for them for the sector.”
WRAP’s recycling advisor added that the body has been developing interventions and reforms about how business support would look to address this.
MRFs
Later in the discussion, Mr Mills touched on materials recycling facilities (MRFs) and their readiness for the Simpler Recycling proposals.
He outlined that a third of sorting plants are not currently accepting the proposed core materials, which will be coming from both the household and non-household sectors.
“That’s the additional cartons and foils and metals, and in some places plastic bottles, tubs and trays etc which will all need to be processed,” he explained.
“Another of their key challenges is about how they transition and that funding. Because they’re clearly not doing these materials for an economic or market reason. Another challenge is that there’s no register of kits. It’s very hard to understand the baseline and what kit is actually needed and how you audit or validate that. And a lot of the kits, suppliers, the installers are also the same manufacturers who make kits for DRS and counting houses. So if we are going to see this sort of growth, there is competing demand in that space.”
Mr Mills explained that WRAP has been interviewing or surveying all MRFs that are not “up to speed” and surveying all of the authorities to understand who is going to be feeding what MRFs, where they’re at with their contracts and negotiations of what they need.
Subscribe for free